Politicization of the background
of Nizami Ganjavi: Attempted de-Iranization of a historical Iranian figure by
the USSR

By Dr. Ali Doostzadeh

(alidoostzadeh “AT”yahoo.com)

تقدیم
به یاد
ولادمیر
مینورسکی و
نوروز علی محمداف

(In memory of Vladimir Minorsky and Nowruzali Mohammadzadeh)

Special thanks go to Shahrbaraz http://shahrbaraz.blogspot.com
for proof-reading and adding useful comments.This article is dedicated to the memory of Novruzali Mammadov and
Vladimir Minorsky.

Note 1: The
article believes that Nizami Ganjavi despite his Iranic background, culture and
contribution to Iranian civilization, and being a product of this civilization
is a universal figure.He is also equally
a part of the heritage of Iran,
Kurdistan, Afghanistan,
Tajikistan and modern republic of Azerbaijan.These are people that are either Iranian or have been greatly affected
by Iranian civilization although at his own time, the concept of nation-state
did not exist for any particular modern country to claim Nizami Ganjavi.People of Iranic backgrounds and inheritors
of Persian language, civilization and culture have the duty to present this
universal figure to the world and keep his language alive.At the same time, this great figure has been
politically manipulated by some ethno-minded scholars and USSR
ethno-engineers.The article discusses
this issue at length where USSR tried (and failed) to detach this great Iranian
figure from Iranian civilization.

Note
2: the PDF version of this article reads
much better and can be downloaded from here:

The goal of this article is to examine the ethnic
roots and cultural association of Nezami Ganjavi, one of the greatest Persian
poets.It is of course well known that
Nezami is a universal figure, but there are two reasons to examine his ethnic
and cultural associations.The first
reason is that it helps us understand his work better. We provide exposition of rare sources (such
as Nozhat al-Majales) which are crucial for the study of the 12th
century region of Arran and Sherwan.The
other reason to write this article, as explained later in this paper (under the
section: politicization of Nizami USSR
and its remnants today), is the politicization surrounding Nezami Ganjavi’s
ethnic and cultural background by the USSR for the purpose of nation
building. Through objective analysis based on Nezami Ganjavi’s work and other
primary sources, we analyze the ethnic root and cultural background of Nezami
Ganjavi.

The politicization discussion centers on the
following points. Despite the fact that Nizami Ganjavi being a Persian poet and
all of his poetry is in Persian, is he a cultural icon from the Iranian
civilization or Turkic civilization? What is his ethnic background and does it
play role in assigning to which civilization he belongs?

ای برادر
تو همه
اندیشه ای

مابقی تو
استخوان و
ریشه ای

And does this question matter at all, given
Nizami’s usage of Persian as his cultural vehicle and hence his contribution to
Persian culture, language and civilization? Given the fact that Nizami
Ganjavi’s poem cannot be translated without losing its multi-layered symbolic
meaning and fine details, and given the fact that there is no “pure ethnicity”
in the modern Middle East and Caucasia, and
given the fact that ethnic divisions were not as prominent as they are today,
does the question even matter? The belief of this author is that the Persian
poet Nizami Ganjavi belongs to all humanity equally. At the same time, Nizami
and his legacy are part of the same culture that he was influenced by and
expanded upon.That is other great poets
before him, including Ferdowsi, Asadi Tusi, Fakhr ad-in Asad Gorgani and Sanai
were his predecessors.Those who speak,
read and write Persian, and understand verses of Nizami’s poetry, are those
that keep the heritage of Nizami alive today and have a special responsibility
to pass down the cultural heritage of great Persian poets like Ferdowsi, Sanai,
Nizami, Attar and many others. For example, Pushkin who is the most popular
literary figure of Russians is a Russian poet and has served the Russian
language and followed the Russian literary tradition. His ethnicity from his
father’s side was partially Ethiopian but nevertheless he is part of Russian
culture and civilization.We shall get
back to this issue in the conclusion of this essay. Thus the question of
ethnicity is secondary relative to that of the culture/civilization which a
poet arises from and contributes towards.Especially in the middle ages when the concept of nation-state did not
exist and one has to concentrate on ethnicity and culture which defines
ethnicity.

Despite this simple fact that ethnicity of most 12th
century figures (and most people do not know their say 20th
ancestor!) cannot be 100% known, we will look into the details of Nizami’s
background and we will provide criticism for invalid interpretations, recent
forgeries of non-existent verses and the politicization of Nizami by the USSR
in order to materialize Stalin’s unfulfilled wish that “Nizami
must not be surrendered to Iranian/Persian literature”!
Ultimately, Nizami is part and parcel of Persian-Iranian literature and
culture, since he lives through this language, all his thoughts are in this
language and he is popular due the masterpieces in this language.The question of whether he belongs to Iranian
civilization or Turkic civilization is simply answered by anyone who can read
his untranslatable work in its original language. The issue of his ethnicity
has no bearing on this fact. Yet, we will look at this issue in detail and
show that there is nothing to support a Turkic ethnicity for Nizami where-as
the corpus of Nizami’s work and other historical and cultural reasons show an Iranic
background.That is the issue of
claiming Turkic father line for Nizami lacks any solid proof and is used today
ethno-nationalists from the republic of Azerbaijan to detach Nezami Ganjavi
from Iranian civilization.

It
is clearly evident that in terms of cultural orientation, cultural background,
legacy, myth, folklore and language, Nizami Ganjavi is part of Iranian
civilization and a prominent of Persian cultural history.Thus
attempted political annexation of Nizami Ganjavi from Iranian civilization and
attribution of Nizami Ganjavi towards Turkic civilization will simply bear no
fruit in the long run (since he does not even have a single verse in any other
language than Persian) and is a futile political effort which was taken up by
USSR for nation-building process and is continued today for unscientific
reasons of ethnic nationalism.Nizami
Ganjavi survives through more than 30000+ Persian verses and his background is
well known to be at least half Iranic and we will show in this article that it
was full Iranic. There is nothing to support a Turkic background for Nizami
Ganjavi’s father, who Nizami was orphaned from in an early age and was raised
by his Kurdish maternal uncle Khwaja Umar.

The reader of course is free to make their own
conclusion, but this does not change the simple fact that Nizami inherited the
Persian heritage by previous Iranian poets, composed in the Persian language through
Iranian culture, is alive through the
Persian language, Iranian folklore, mythology and culture and finally it is the
Persian speakers of the world who can read him in his own language and
appreciate his untranslatable poetry (he is arguably one of the hardest poets
to translate because of the multi-layered meaning of many verses, play with language
and extensive use of symbolism/imagery pertinent to Persian language and
culture).At the same time, we do not
deny his shared heritage among countries that have been influenced heavily by
Iranian culture and are inheritors of Iranian civilizations and culture. Thus
besides highlighting the politicization by the USSR and Stalin, the article will expose
many forgeries and invalid arguments to detach Nezami Ganjavi from Iranian
background, language and culture.

In this article we use the term Persian, Kurdish,
Azeri, Iranic, Qipchaq, Oghuz and Turkic. It is important to have a clear
definition with this regard.

Kurdish: Speaker of the dialects and languages
considered Kurdish which is the NW Iranian language family.

Persian: Is a native speaker of various Iranian
dialects. This includes Pahlavi dialects as

well as NW Iranic languages identified as Fahlaviyyat
and Azari during the middle ages and also the Parsi-Dari. The term
Persian usually is not as a single linguistic term rather it denotes a speaker
of variety any of the Iranic dialects who have pre-Islamic Sassanid heritage
and Iranian mythology as exemplified by the Shahnameh. We will make a
distinction when we speak of the Dari form of Persian (itself according to
scholars the Khorasani dialect of Middle Persian) rather than what Qatran
Tabrizi, Al-Masudi, Biruni and Nezami have called Persian (Parsi), which is the
general definition.

Iranic: Means a native speaker of the Iranic
languages. This term encompasses both Persian and Kurdish and various other Iranian
speakers including Soghdians, Scythians, Medes and etc. In general it
encompasses the totality of Iranian civilization and languages as well those
with Iranian heritages.

Oghuz: Speaker of Oghuz dialects, mainly the
western Turkic languages.

Qipchaq: Speakers of Qipchaq or similar eastern
Turkic languages.

Turkic: Like Iranic, it denotes the speakers of
Turkic languages. In Persian literature, the Mongols have also been considered
as Turks since the bulk of the troops and tribes of the Mongol federation were
of Turkic rather than Mongolic origin. Also the term Tatar has been used in
this fashion. Thus Turkic encompasses the totality of various Turkic cultures,
language and civilizations and the Altaic people.It should be noted that however in early
Islamic era, non-Altaic speakers such as Soghdians, Alans and Avesta Turanians
etc. have also been lumped with Turks in some sources due to geographical
reasons.See Appendix B and C of this
article for some observations with this regard.

Arabic: Native Arab speaker.

Armenian: Native Armenian speaker.

Georgian/Caucasian: Speaker of one of the
languages that has been loosely classified as Caucasian languages by linguists
of today.

“In the Achaemenid period Azerbaijan was part of the satrapy
of Media. When the Achaemenid Empire collapsed, Atropates, the Persian satrap
of Media, made himself independent in the northwest of this region in 321 B.C.
Thereafter Greek and Latin writers named the territory Media Atropatene or, less
frequently, Media Minor (e.g. Strabo 11.13.1; Justin 23.4.13). The Middle
Persian form of the name was (early) Aturpatakan, (later) Adurbadgan) whence
the New Persian Adarbayjan”

The
word Azari/Azeri has been used in the early Islamic period for a
Persian related Iranian dialect. Naturally the name of the dialect was derived
from the name of the region itself. We will make mention of this Iranic dialect
later in the article.

But it is important to note that the ethnonym Azeri/Azerbaijani
has been used no earlier than the late 19th century or the early 20thcentury to designate Turkic speaking Shi’i
Muslims(Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, “Turko-Tatars”)(Roy,
Oliver. “The new Central Asia: The Creation of
Nations”) and was really accepted as a self-designation around 1930.

The origin of Turkic speaking Azeris has been
described as:

1)Iranic

2)Turkic

3)Symbiosis of Iranic and
Turkic

4)Symbiosis of Iranic, Turkish
and Caucasian peoples

According to the multi-volume book
“History of the East” (“Transcaucasia in XI-XV centuries” in Rostislav Borisovich Rybakov (editor), History of the East. 6 volumes.v. 2. “East during the Middle Ages: Chapter
V., 2002. – ISBN 5-02-017711-3.http://gumilevica.kulichki.com/HE2/he2510.htm )

The formation of a distinct Turkic speaking
groups who speak the language called “Azerbaijani-Turkic”(note in Iran it is
called Torki and the pre-fix “Azerbaijani” to Turkic is also recent) language
occurred between 15th-16th century.

In the XIV-XV cc., as the Azerbaijani
Turkic-language ethnos was beginning to form, arose its culture, as well. At
first it had no stable centers of its own (recall that one of its early
representatives, Nesimi, met his death in Syria) and it is rather difficult at
that time to separate from the Osman (Turkish) culture.Even the ethnic boundary between the Turks
and the Azerbaijanis stabilized only in the XVI c., and even then it was not
quite defined yet. Nevertheless, in the XV c., two centers of the Azerbaijani
culture are forming: the South Azerbaijan and (lowland) Karabakh. They took
final shape later, in the XVI-XVIII cc.

Speaking of the Azerbaijan culture
originating at that time, in the XIV-XV cc., one must bear in mind, first of
all, literature and other parts of culture organically connected with the
language. As for the material culture, it
remained traditional even after the Turkicization of the local population.
However, the presence of a massive layer of Iranians that took part in the
formation of the Azerbaijani ethnos, have imposed its imprint, primarily on the
lexicon of the Azerbaijani language which contains a great number of Iranian
and Arabic words. The latter entered both the Azerbaijani and the Turkish
language mainly through the Iranian intermediary. Having become independent,
the Azerbaijani culture retained close connections with the Iranian and Arab
cultures. They were reinforced by common religion and common cultural-historical
traditions.”

Thus neither the ethnonym nor ethnic group nor
language by the name Azerbaijani-Turk has been recorded in the 12th
century.Since this ethnonym Azeri/Azerbaijani
was not in use during the time of Nizami to refer to any dialect and group of
Turkic speaking people, then it is not used in this work.Also one
cannot necessarily talk of an Azerbaijani Turkic group in the 12th
century as noted by the sources above (we will show Azerbaijan was far from
Turkified by the 12th century using primary sources).The fact remains that the ethnonym Azeri/Azerbaijani
was not in use at the time of Nezami, although Azerbaijanis have a thick layer
of Iranian culture as well. Thus to say Nezami was an Azerbaijani poet does not
correspond to any historical fact, since the term Azerbaijani was not used for
an ethnic group (it was a geographical location of NW Iran) and the Azerbaijani
Turkic ethnic group was not formed back then.He did not write in Azerbaijani-Turkish language (no one from 1140-1209
has written in that language from the Caucasus) and neither was the ethnic
designation Azerbaijani used during or before his time.The formation/ethno genesis of ethnic
Azerbaijanis as a symbiosis and blending of Iranic, Turkic and Caucasian
elements comes in a much later. Also the land of Nezami Ganjavi, where he might
have been born (most likely Ganja according to modern scholars and a minority
of manuscripts have said Qom in central Persia or some scholars have said his
ancestry from his father-side was in Tafresh), was really called Arran rather
than Azerbaijan by most historical/geographical sources at that time.Indeed
Nizami uses Arran, Armenia
and Azarabadegan (Azerbaijan)
and the majority of historical sources have differentiated between these three
lands at the time of Nezami Ganjavi.

Some might make a counter-argument that they want
to use the term Oghuz Turk or Turkic in general instead of Azeri. In
their opinions, modern Azerbaijanis are Oghuz Turks (also called Tatars by
Russians). The difference between eastern Turkic (Qipchaq) and Western Turkic
Oghuz had become significant at the time of Nizami. Thus they might even reduce
it to Western Turkic. In any case, “Turk” is a very generic term as an ethnic
indicator: Would it have suggested “Azeri Turkish” in Nezami’s day, or
was there even yet such a language branched out from the common Oghuz?
Definitely not - most likely it would suggest the Seljuq tribesmen, whom I
believe were Oghuz, but around the same time, it could also refer to Khatai
Turkic, or Uighur, Chaghatay, Turkoman, Mongol (Mongols and Turks being used
interchangeably in Persian literature around the time of the Mongol invasion), Kipchaks,
Chinese, and Tibetans(being identified with Turks in some Islamic literature
like Qabusnama), Iranic Sogdians (they have been identified with Turks in some
Arabic literature due to being neighbors of Turks) etc.? We have no exact data
from those days, but we may assume that the various Turkic speakers, to the
extent that they held a shared sense of identity, would do so on the basis of a
similar language and nomadic lifestyles although tribal identifications would
overtake any sort of shared cultural identity between these groups.

Here are what some scholars and authorities state
on the ethno genesis of modern Azerbaijanis.Some have stated that an Azerbaijani ethnic group was formed by the XIII
centuries, however more specialized sources put it around the Safavid era
XVI.We believe the fact that Safina
Tabrizi and Nozhat al-Majales (to be discussed later) show major urban centers
of Arran, Sherwan and Azerbaijan to have been Iranic even in the Ilkhanid era
are an elegant proof that the latter date of XVI is when Azerbaijan and Eastern
Transcaucasia was decisively Turkified.

Professor Richard Frye states:

The Turkish speakers of Azerbaijan
are mainly descended from the earlier Iranian speakers, several pockets of whom
still exist in the region

(Frye, Richard Nelson, “Peoples of Iran”, in
Encyclopedia Iranica).

For
example Professor Tadsuez Swietchowski states:

What is now the AzerbaijanRepublic was known as Caucasian Albania in the pre-Islamic period, and later as Arran. From the time of ancient Media (ninth to seventh
centuries B.C.) and the Persian Empire (sixth to fourth centuries B.C.),
Azerbaijan usually shared the history of what is now Iran. According to the
most widely accepted etymology, the name “Azerbaijan”is derived from Atropates,
the name of a Persian satrap of the late fourth century B.C. Another theory
traces the origin of the name to the Persian word azar (“fire”‘) - hence Azerbaijan, “the Land of Fire”,
because of Zoroastrian temples, with their fires fueled by plentiful supplies
of oil.

Azerbaijan maintained its national character after its conquest by the
Arabs in the mid-seventh century A.D. and its subsequent conversion to Islam.
At this time it became a province in the early Muslim empire. Only in the 11th
century, when Oghuz Turkic tribes under the Seljuk dynasty entered the country,
did Azerbaijan
acquire a significant number of Turkic inhabitants. The original Persian
population became fused with the Turks, and gradually the Persian language was
supplanted by a Turkic dialect that evolved into the distinct Azerbaijani
language. The process of Turkification was long and complex, sustained by
successive waves of incoming nomads from Central Asia.
After the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, Azerbaijan became a part of the
empire of Hulagu and his successors, the Il-Khans. In the 15th century it
passed under the rule of the Turkmens who founded the rival Qara Qoyunlu (Black
Sheep) and Aq Qoyunlu (White Sheep) confederations. Concurrently, the native
Azerbaijani state of the Shirvan-Shahs flourished.

“The mass of the Oghuz Turkic tribes who crossed the Amu
Darya towards the west left the Iranian plateau, which remained Persian, and
established themselves more to the west, in Anatolia.
Here they divided into Ottomans, who were Sunni and settled, and Turkmens, who
were nomads and in part Shiite (or, rather, Alevi). The latter were to keep the
name “Turkmen”for a long time: from the 13th century onwards they “Turkised”the
Iranian populations of Azerbaijan
(who spoke west Iranian languages such as Tat, which is still found in residual
forms), thus creating a new identity based on Shiism and the use of Turkish.
These are the people today known as Azeris.”

(Olivier
Roy. “The new Central Asia”, I.B. Tauris, 2007. Pg 7)

Although,
we do not believe the Oghuz nomads were Shi’ites when they entered Iran,
rather they were Hanafis. They turned to Shi’ism probably due to the Ilkhanid
atmosphere where Shi’ism was supported by some Ilkhanid rulers like Sultan
Khodabanda.A further testament to this
fact is that there is not Turkic Shi’ites in Central Asia and thus the adoption
of Shi’ism by Turkic speaking tribes occurred in Anatolia and Persia.

Professor
Peter Golden has written one the most comprehensive book on Turkic people called
An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Peter B. Golden.
Otto Harrasowitz, 1992). Professor Golden confirms that the Medes were Iranians
and Iranian languages like Talyshi/Tati speakers being assimilated into Turkish
speakers. Considering the Turkic penetration in Caucasian Azerbaijan and the
Turkification of large parts ofNorth
Western Persia, Professor Golden states in pg 386 of his book:

Turkic penetration probably began in the Hunnic era and its
aftermath. Steady pressure from Turkic nomads was typical of the Khazar era,
although there are no unambiguous references to permanent settlements. These
most certainly occurred with the arrival of the Oguz in the 11th century. The
Turkicization of much of Azarbayjan, according to Soviet scholars, was
completed largely during the Ilxanid period if not by late Seljuk times. Sumer, placing
a slightly different emphasis on the data (more correct in my view), posts
three periods which Turkicization took place: Seljuk, Mongol and Post-Mongol
(Qara Qoyunlu, Aq Qoyunlu and Safavid). In the first two, Oguz Turkic tribes
advanced or were driven to the western frontiers (Anatolia) and Northern
Azarbaijan (Arran, the Mugan steppe). In the
last period, the Turkic elements in Iran
(derived from Oguz, with lesser admixture of Uygur, Qipchaq, Qaluq and other
Turks brought to Iran during
the Chinggisid era, as well as Turkicized Mongols) were joined now by Anatolian
Turks migrating back to Iran.
This marked the final stage of Turkicization. Although there is some evidence
for the presence of Qipchaqs among the Turkic tribes coming to this region,
there is little doubt that the critical mass which brought about this
linguistic shift was provided by the same Oguz-Turkmen tribes that had come to
Anatolia. The Azeris of today are an overwhelmingly sedentary, detribalized
people. Anthropologically, they are little distinguished from the Iranian
neighbors.

It
should be noted that Professor Golden on pg 12 of the same book states:

“Turkic population of today shows extraordinary physical
diversity, certainly much greater than that of any group of Altaic language.
The original Turkish physical type, if we can really posit such, for it should
be borne in mind that this mobile population was intermixing with its neighbors
at a very stage, was probably of the Mongloid type(in all likelihood in its
South Siberian variant). With may deduce this from the fact that populations in
previously Europoid areas of Iranian speech begin to show Mongoloid influences
coincidental with the appearances of Turkic people. The physical transformation
of these Turkicizing peoples, however, illustrated by the population of Uzbekistan, Karakalpakia and especially the
Turkic population of Iran
and Turkey
itself. To add to the complexity of this process, the Turkic populations that
moved to Central Asia were themselves already
mixed. In general, then, the further east, the more Mongloid the Turkic
population is; the further west, the more Europoid”

We
shall affirm this fact by showing the description of Turks in classical Persian
literature in another section. Indeed, this physical description, as described
by countless poets including Nizami was Mongloid rather than Caucasoid and this
point to the Turkification of the mainly Caucasoid-featured population by the
Mongolid-featured Altaic groups.

According
to Professor Xavier De Planhol:

“Azeri material culture, a result of this multi-secular
symbiosis, is thus a subtle combination of indigenous elements and nomadic
contributions, but the ratio between them is remains to be determined. The few
researches undertaken (Planhol, 1960) demonstrate the indisputable predominance
of Iranian tradition in agricultural techniques (irrigation, rotation systems,
terraced cultivation) and in several settlement traits (winter troglodytism of
people and livestock, evident in the widespread underground stables). The large
villages of Iranian peasants in the irrigated valleys have worked as points for
crystallization of the newcomers even in the course of linguistic transformation;
these places have preserved their sites and transmitted their knowledge. The
toponyms, with more than half of the place names of Iranian origin in some
areas, such as the Sahand, a huge volcanic massif south of Tabriz, or the Qara
Dagh, near the border (Planhol, 1966, p. 305; Bazin, 1982, p. 28) bears witness
to this continuity. The language itself provides eloquent proof. Azeri, not
unlike Uzbek (see above), lost the vocal harmony typical of Turkish languages.
It is a Turkish language learned and spoken by Iranian peasants.”

One may add that the overlay of a strong superstate by a
dialect from the eastern parts of Iran does not imply the conclusion
that ethnically all Kurdish speakers are from the east, just as one would
hesitate to identify the majority of Azarbayjani speakers as ethnic Turks. The
majority of those who now speak Kurdish most likely were formerly speakers of
Median dialect.

It
is important to note that the Oghuz Turks who Turkified Azerbaijan
linguistically were not themselves pure Turks according to Mahmud Kasghari.
Although without a doubt Turkic speaking, Turkology expert N. Light comments on
this in his Turkic literature and the politics of culture in the Islamic
world (1998):

“... It is clear that he [al-Kashgari] `a priori´ excludes
the Oghuz, Qipchaq and Arghu from those who speak the pure Turk language.
These are the Turks who are most distant from Kashghari’s idealized homeland
and culture, and he wants to show his Arab readers why they are not true
Turks, but contaminated by urban and foreign influences. Through his
dictionary, he hopes to teach his readers to be sensitive to ethnic differences
so they do not loosely apply the term Turk to those who do not deserve it.
...”

N.
Light further explains:

“... Kashgari clearly distinguishes the Oghuz language from
that of the Turks when he says that Oghuz is more refined because they use
words alone which Turks only use in combination, and describes Oghuz as more
mixed with Persian ...”

There are others opinions but we believe that a
symbiosis between Iranian and Turkic elements (where the Oghuz nomads
themselves before entering Azerbaijan
and the Caucasia had already assimilated some Iranian nomads in Central Asia)
formed the ethnicity of modern Azerbaijanis in the Caucasus and Iran, although
the number of Turkmen nomads who entered Azerbaijan and Caucasia was small
relative to the original population.The
Turkmens of Iran and Turkmenistan,
all of them nomads till the last century, also speak an Oghuz dialect which has
been described as more archaic than that of the Turkish of NW Iran, Caucasia and
Anatolia. There are probably many similarities
between them and the Oghuz nomads who entered Azerbaijan during the Seljuq
prelude and Turkmens of Iran and Turkmenistan.

Since the term Azeri/Azerbaijani as an
ethnic term for the speakers of Turkic languages in Iran
and Caucasia was adopted in the late 19th
century(possibly some Russian works might have used Azerbaijani-Tatar and
shortened it to Azerbaijani) or early 20th , we will not use it in
this article.If some feel the identification
of Azerbaijani Turk with Oghuz Turks because of linguistic
reason, then we have used the term Oghuz Turks and Turkic in this article.Because the terms Oghuz and Turk are
historical term that had been in use since at least 10th
century.On the other hand, the ethnic name
Azeri/AzerbaijaniTurkic was not accepted until the 1920s or
1930s by its speakers and the overwhelming reference to ”Azerbaijani” without
any suffix is geographical in the period before the adoption of this name for
ethnic identification.

As noted by Oliver Roy:

“The
concept of Azeri identity barely appears at all before 1920. Up until
that point Azerbaijan had been a purely geographical area. Before 1924,
the Russians called Azeri Tatars "Turk"
or "Muslims".(Roy, Oliver.
“The new Central Asia: The Creation of
Nations”).

According to Prof. Tadeusz Swietochowski:
"Azerbaijani" was coined in the 1930s to refer to the inhabitants of
the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.(Azerbaijan Seven Years of Conflict
Nagorno-Karabagh – Human Rights Watch / Helsinki– December 1994 by Human Rights
Watch).

Overall then, the term Azeri/Azerbaijani was
overwhelmingly and primarily used as a geographical area before 1930 and also
designates inhabitants of the newly formed state of Azerbaijan regardless of
their ethnicity (Talysh, Tat, Azeris, Lezgins, Kurds, Armenians).So words like “Azerbaijan poet” or
“Azerbaijani poet” might have been used a geographical designation for some
poets of the area by scholars, but they did not have any sort of ethnic meaning
and were purely geographical.Just like
Khorasani poets or Khwarizmi Poet or Esfahani Poet or Shirazi poet..and etc is
geographical.Some authors also
distinguish between “Azerbaijani” and “Azeri”.“Azerbaijani” means citizen of the republic of Azerbaijan or from the
land of Azerbaijan where-as “Azeri” means the native speaker of Azeri Turkic.

In any event, we shall show from Nizami and the
writing of other Persian poets, the physical features of Turk are clearly
described as Mongloid and do not resemble those of the Caucasoid Anatolian and
Azerbaijani Turkic speakersThis
alongside recent genetic evidence indicates that a language replacement via
elite dominance is a likely explanation of the Turkification of Anatolia, Caucasia and Iranian Azerbaijan. Nizami does use Iranians,
Parsi/’Ajam(Persian) ,Kurd(Kurd), Taazi(Arab), Turk(Oghuz, Qipchaq, Khatai..),
Alan and Rus (the Viking Rus) and etc. So we will use the terminology used
during his time and this is the correct historiography that diligent historians
of that era utilize.We should note that
term ‘Ajam was originally used by Arabs for Iranians but slowly this term
became accepted and even Iranian nationalist poets like Ferdowsi and Asadi Tusi
have used it in a positive manner and Nezami who was influenced by these two
poets has also used it interchangeably with Parsi.Also Khaqani’s title was the Persian Hessān al-‘Ajam (the Persian Hessan, Hessan being a very
famous Arab poet before Islam and Khaqani is the Persian version of him by this
title).

It
should be noted that Nezami has specifically himself mentioned the area where
he lived as part of the “Persian realm” which is a cultural and geographical
term.The reader can also see the
section: Regional Iranian Culture and Nezami’s designation of Iran/Persian
for his land of this article for further usage of these terms.

Usage of Azerbaijani to describe Nezami based on
geography is also not valid at Nizami’s time (although he was born in the
territory that is called Azerbaijan today), since the territory around Ganja
usually was primarily called Arran rather than Azerbaijan in medieval
history.Thus we should mention
that some Western sources and possibly other sources have used the term Azerbaijani
or Azerbaijan poet (not ethnic sense
since such a name was not adopted until the 1930s and before 1930s its
primarily and overwhelming usage was geographic) for Nezami as a geographical
designation, but this is not historically valid as Nizami himself uses the
terms Aran, Arman and Azarabadegaan.Also Nezami has praised three different rulers as rulers of Iran/Persian
and Persian lands, and this shows that not only culture but the land was
considered part of the geographical/cultural region of Persia/Iran.

An
example of erroneously using this term and anachronism is for example given by
this quote by a noted scholar:"In the fifteenth century a native
Azeri state of Shirvanshahs flourished north of the Araxes." (Tadeusz
Swietochowski. Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition,
Columbia University, 1995, p. 2.)

Yet
the Shirvanshah called their territory Shirwan, not Azerbaijan.Also the Shirwanshah were not ethnically
Turkic, but were a mixture of Iranians and Arabs and culturally they were
Persians.And also “Azeri” denotes the
native Turkic speaker where-as Azerbaijani would at least have geographical
meaning.

This
sort of wrong and anachronistic application of geographical name has
unfortunately occurred many times and has been used for various poets and
scientific figures.

An inquirer asked one academic writer who used
this term:

In
the book “Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-century Iran” on page 65 you wrote “The
renowned Azerbaijani poet, Nizami of…”.
What do you mean with “Azerbaijani poet Nizami”? Ethnic, cultural, geographical
or other characteristic?

The
Author of the book who used the term responded back:

geographical. The whole subject of nationalities is
fraught with controversy since in mediaeval times nation-states did not exist
people could not so easily be labeled. Often people were defined by their city,
e.g. Samarqandi, Balkhi, though often by the region, Rumi. Nizami has been
claimed by the modern state of Azerbaijan though he continues to be considered
a Persian poet and for the student seeking further information Azerbaijan could
be a starting point for their research. You should not read too much into such
labels. George Lane

Despite
this, we should note that Ganja at that time was part of Arran and the area was
not called Azerbaijan.So indeed this is
a wrong and anachronistic application of the geographical conventions.At the same time, it illustrates that by this
convention, is being used as a modern geographical location(Azeri, Azerbaijani)
and not necessarily culture, ethnicity, language and heritage.

Also
as the author who responded back noted, the concept of nation-state did not
exist back then.This is an important
point which some people have not unfortunately grasped.So for example to speak of Iranian or Turkic
or Azeri or Arab or Armenian or Georgiancitizenship or nationality(based on citizenship rather than
culture/ethnicity) at that era does not make sense since the ethnicity of the
ruler had no implication on the citizenship (e.g. Seljuqs controlled Iran but
overwhelming majority of the inhabitants were neither Turks or Seljuqians and
no one identified their identity through a state).

So
for example the Buyids were an “Iranian State”(meaning an Iranic-speaking
ruling elite controlled a state) but they controlled areas (such as Iraq) that
had a substantial non-Iranian population.Those non-Iranian population will not be considered Iranians ethnically
or culturally just because the Buyids were Iranian rulers(which some might call
“Iranian State”).Thesame is
true with Seljuqs or the semi-autonomous Atabeks who had established a state with
Turkic ruling elite, but their main population was non-Turkic and so the
identity of their inhabitants should not be erroneously described as the
citizenship/nationality(based on state not ethnicity/language)/nation-state
concepts that did not exist at that time.

As per the term Azari, there was an ancient
Azari-Fahlavi language or group of dialects spoken in Iranian-Azerbaijan
(Atrapatakan) (remnants of it being the Tati in Iran), but this was an Iranic
language. We shall touch upon this later. Scientifically, one cannot impose a
different space and time upon medieval historical settings. So at the time of
Nizami Ganjavi, the term Azerbaijani did not denote a subset of Turkic
speakers.At his time, the overwhelming
majority of the sources have referred to the area of Ganja as part of Arran.For
example, to say, Homer was Turkish because he was born in the land of Turkey
does not seem correct. Certainly the people of Turkey
should be proud of him that such a great figure has come from their land, but
to assign him the modern majority ethnicity Turkish of Turkey does not make sense since
such a term even did not exist nor is attested during the time of Homer. This
author is of the opinion of Professor Xavier Planhol:

“Azeri material culture, a result of this multi-secular
symbiosis, is thus a subtle combination of indigenous elements and nomadic
contributions, but the ratio between them is remains to be determined.”

Thus
just like ancient Egyptians spoke ancient Egyptian, but modern Egyptians speak
Arabic, it does not mean that ancient Egyptians are not connected to modern
Egyptians.Same with modern Turks of
Anatolia who also share in the pre-Turkic Greek civilization.Although it should be mentioned that there are Iranian
speakers in some of these countries although many of them have become
Turcophones gradually in the last several hundred years and rapidly in last
century.The difference with Iranian
cultural items that are claimed by modern Turkic speaking countries (Biruni,
Rudaki, and Avicenna in Uzbekistan; Nizami, Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism,
Bahmanyar.. in the Republic of Azerbaijan; and Abu Said Abul Khair in
Turkmenistan) is that there are also countries that speak Iranian languages and
Persian in particular, thus they rightfully also claim to be inheritors of
these Iranian cultural items, since the culture has continued.Especially for such a poet as Nizami Ganjavi,
who only wrote in Persian and contributed to the Persian culture and language,
expanded Persian myths and legends and finally came from an Iranian
background.In the end, these countries
(both Iranian speaking and Turkic speaking) have a shared heritage due to the
fact that some of these Turkic countries had a linguistic shift from Iranian languages
to Turkish languages due to migration of Turkic nomads and the Turkification of
some of the lands.The question of
whether Nizami belongs to Iranian civilization or Turkic civilization is
something we will discuss in this article. We also note that modern nationalism
especially that of pan-Turkism which has also influenced Caucasia, was a
reactionary movement spawning out of the decay and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Thus that secular identity created by it today
(which is based on ethno-nationalism as seen in modern Turkey and republic of
Azerbaijan) in our opinion is radically different than the identities of the
Caucasia and Ottoman Empire prior to this
period.For a clear picture of identity
of the Caucasus in the 12th century, one can look at the book Nozhat
al-Majales which we shall discuss later in this article.

Since the ethnonym Azerbaijani for an ethnic group
was new, the USSR era did not provide a clear definition.For example some considered Azerbaijanis to
be Medes, others as Turks and others as Caucasian Albanians.Then there was theories combining some or all
of these.This is another reason why
calling Nezami Ganjavi as “Azerbaijani” in the politicized USSR sources lacks
clarity.Do they mean Medes(and the
descendant of Iranic Medes like Talysh, Kurds?), or Caucasian Albanians or
Turks and etc.

Forexample Bolukbashi mentions:

“During the
Stalin era, Azeri historians were forced to link Azeri history to Persian
Medes, whose appearance in Iran and the southern Caucasus dates back to the
ninth century BC.In the post-Stalin
era, this theory gave away to one which linked the Azeris’ origin to the
Atropathenes and Caucasian Albania.By
the early 1970s, however, the Turkic role in Azeri history had begun to be
admitted, so that until the Gorbachev era the Azerbaijani historiography based
Azeri identity on a combination of the Medes, the Atropathenes, the Albanians
and the Turkic settlers, a formula which helped prevent the emergence of an all-Turkic
historiography”

(Susha Bolukbashi, ‘Nation building in Azerbaijan: The Soviet
Legacy and the Impact of the Karabakh Conflict’ in Van Schendel, Willem(Editor)
. Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World: Nationalism,
Ethnicity and Labour in the Twentieth Century. London , GBR: I. B. Tauris &
Company, Limited, 2001.)

Arya
Wasserman notes:

“The growing interest in the nationalities problem and the
rising influence of the ideology of Turkism revived the old controversy over
the ethnogenesis of the Azerbaijani people, that is between adherents of the
concept of the decisive Turkic role and supporters of the pro-Iranian
theory.In the mid 1970s, the republican
authorities headed by the First Secretary Heydar Aliev had resolved the debate
by ruling in favour of the Iranian concept.Now, for the first time monographs dedicated of this problem were
published. The purely scientific
problem of ethnogenesis became a regular theme in newspapers.The authors of some articles used this
discussion to express their opposition to the policy of Turkicization.Politicians also intervened in the
dispute.The President’s adviser on
nationalities, Idaiat Orujev, supported the concept according to which
Azerbaijan was the homeland of Oguz Turks, which obviously meant that he was
inclined to accept the theory of the Turkic origins of the Azerbaijani
people.

Opponents of the proto-Turkic conceptions of ethnogenesis of
the Azerbaijani people insist that the Kurds, Talysh, Lakhij and other
Persian-speaking peoples are ethnic Azerbaijanis, who had a part from ancient
times in the ethnogenesis of the Azerbaijani people, and that all of them share
the same Caspian racial type, to which no other Turkic-speaking peoples, not
even the Turks themselves, belong to”

(Aryeh
Wasserman, “A Year of Rule by the Popular Front of Azerbaijan” in Yaacov Roi,
“Muslim Eurasia”, Routeldge, 1995. pp 150-152.)

Thus
the usage of “Azerbaijani” as an ethnic term was recent and doing the USSR era,
the term did not necessarily mean Turcophone people.Now, today the designation “Azeri” and
“Azerbaijani” are further confused because Azerbaijani has been used as a
geographical term since 1918 for all inhabitants of Eastern Southern Caucasus
(corresponding to the modern republic of Azerbaijan) where as “Azeri” denotes
the Oghuz Azerbaijani-Turkic speaker of that area.But for the USSR, it seems to have meant a
combination of Turks, Iranians and Caucasian Albanians who became
Turcophones.Prior to that, the term was
mainly geographical and it could be possible some authors after 1918 have
referred to Nezami as an Azerbaijani/Azerbaijanian poet noting that he lived
most if not all of his life in Ganja.However, such an ethnic formation had not yet occurred during the time
of Nezami Ganjavi as noted.Thus the
article will not use anachronistic terms and will stick with terms such as
Persian, Iranic, Turkic, Oghuz, Kurds and etc.

The
reason to write this article is due to the fact that the USSR politicized and even distorted
the character of Nizami Ganjavi for the purpose of nation building. Remnant of
that period still can be seen in some modern post-USSR texts.The USSR tried to detach Nizami Ganjavi
from Iranian civilization and use him for nation building. In this section we
show many of political manipulations surrounding the figure of Nizami Ganjavi.
We will evaluate the merit of the arguments of the USSR era in a later section and
show its invalidity.So in this section,
we prove that politicization of the figure of Nizami Ganjavi and the USSR’s efforts
to detach him from Persian and Iranian culture and appropriate him to an ethnic
and cultural Turkic label. (Something we believe lacks any evidence when
one actually reads Nizami’s works and considers the cultural background of his
work).For example, in recent years,
false verses that are not in any edition or manuscripts of the works of Nizami
have found their way on the internet and are quoted extensively by nationalistic
sites.

One
of these false verses is as follows:

پدر بر پدر مر
مرا ترک بود

به فرزانگی
هر یکی گرگ
بود

Translation:

“Father
upon father of mine were all Turks,

In wisdom each one of them was a wolf”!

The
problems with the above verse is that not only it is not found in any extant
manuscript of Nizami Ganjavi’s work, but also the words “Tork/Turk” do not
rhyme with the words “Gorg/Gurg”(Wolf). For more on the history of the
falsification of this verse which was traced back to 1980 in Azerbaijan SSR
see:

Other
times, poetry from Turkic language poets are ascribed to Nizami Ganjavi. Since Nizami Ganjavi wrote all his works in
Persian, this has led to some nationalist pan-Turkist groups making such
unfounded claims.For example, a
news report appeared where two pan-Turkist nationalists have claimed that they
have found the Divan of Nizami Ganjavi in Turkish.

Divan of Nizami
Ganjavi in Turkish was found in Khedivial library of Egypt, poet and researcher Sadiyar
Eloglu told the APA exclusively.

Eloglu said that he is analyzing Nizami Ganjavi’s divan in Turkish.
He added that the divan was found by Iranian researcher of Azerbaijani origin
Seid Nefisi 40 years ago in Khedivial library but for some reasons the
scientist did not analyze the book.

Poetess from Maraga Fekhri Vahizeden living in Egypt found the divan two years ago
and sent a copy of it to Sadiyar Eloglu. The scientist has been analyzing the
work for two years. He said that the claims denying the works’belonging to
Nizami Ganjavi were not proved.

“Historical points and personalities noted in the works were Nizami
Ganjavi’s contemporaries,”he said. He noted that 213 couplets in the divan were
proved to be written by Nizami Ganjavi.

Eloglu has already published these poems in Iran. /APA/

This
Turkish Diwan was found to be from a poet named Nizami Qunavi (d. 1469 or 1473)
from the Ottoman Empire and it is written in the
Ottoman Turkish language.

We
will later show that at the time of Nizami Ganjavi, not a single verse of
Turkish has ever been written from the area and essentially there is no proof
that a Turkish literary tradition existed in the Caucasia (Arran)
or Azerbaijan at that time.

False
arguments created by the USSR, like “Nizami was forced
to write Persian for the Shirvanshah”, based on misinterpretation of
verses shall also be dealt with in this article.

Another
nationalistic writer who has equated Azeris with Turks (unlike what we wrote)
has written:“Although
Nizami did not produce his work in Azeri language, his narratives are,
nonetheless, rooted in Azeri culture and tradition.”

The
reader is surprised by the above writer since he must think that the Sassanid
heritage (like the stories of Khusraw o Shirin, Haft Paykar) or
the Irano-Islamic rendition of Alexander (Eskandarnama) or the
Persianized story (by Nizami) of Layli o Majnoon have their roots in Turkic
cultures and tradition.Such nationalistic
outbursts are common from ethnic nationalistic scholars but they lack any
scientific basis.

So
what is the root of all these modern forgeries? Why is there a need to
retroactively Turkify Nizami Ganjavi by attributing to him works that are not
his? What is the purpose of creating false verses within the last 30 years or
so in order to attribute Grey Wolf myths to Nizami Ganjavi? What is the origin
of the false argument that “Nizami was forced to write in Persian” or Nizami
was “a victim of Persian Chauvinism”!?

We
must seek the root of all these forgeries by going back to the nation-building
period of the USSR.
I always bring the example of famous Russian poet
Pushkin when some nationalists make their claims about Nizami and attribute him
to Turkic civilization. Pushkin was of Ethiopian origin (his grandfather was
Tsar Peter the Great’s slave). However, he considered himself and is widely
regarded as a Russian poet, and not Ethiopian poet. No one makes even an
attempt to talk about Pushkin’s ethnic origin and question his place in Russian
literature or assign him to Ethiopian literature! In the case of Nizami Ganjavi
however, false verses and unsound reasons were invented (as we shall see mainly
misinterpretation of verses associated with the introduction of Layli o
Majnoon) to claim him of non-Iranian origin and detach him from the Iranian
culture world.So unlike Pushkin were
one can reliably confirm some Ethiopian ancestry, there is absolutely nothing to
suggest Nezami was Turkic, where-as he was at least half Iranic and we will
show in this article that he was full Iranic based on different valid
arguments.The USSR attempted to
disconnect him from the category of Persian literature altogether and to assign
him to the non-existent category (during Nizami’s time) of Azeri literature
, where-as Azeri-Turkic is a branch of Turkic and Nizami Ganjavi does not have
a single verse in that language and actually the first evidence of poetry from
that language from Azerbaijan or Anatolia or Caucasia comes many years after
Nizami.

The Encyclopedic Dictionary Brockhaus and Efron,
published between 1890-1906 (before the USSR) has an entry on Nizami
Ganjavi. It goes as:

“Nizamy (Sheikh Nizamoddin Abu-Mohemmed
Ilyas ibn-Yusof) is the best romantic Persian poet (1141-1203), born in Cumsky
(Qom), but the
nickname is “Ganjevi (Gandzhinsky) because most of life spent in Gunja (now
Elizavetpol), and there however died.

We
note that before the USSR,
not a single book or article has described Nizami Ganjavi as Turkic poet.Even as will be shown later, a Turkic
nationalist like the Chagatai poet Alisher Navai considers Nizami Ganjavi as a
Persian and not a Turk.This indeed
shows how Nezami’s cultural heritage and background was ascertained 200-300
years after his own time.

So
what did occur during the USSR
era? For the readers in Persian, there is an article by Professor Sergei
Aghajanian which has outlined exactly what has occurred:

Sergei Aghajanian, “The fiftieth anniversary of
a historical distortion: On the occasion of the 850th anniversary of
the birth of Nizami”, Iranshenasi, 4th year, Volume 1,
1992-1993.

According
to Aghajanian, around 1930 or so, Nizami Ganjavi’s heritage was changed to
Azerbaijani from Persian and the USSR political committee decided to
detach him from Persian literature and incorporate him into Azerbaijani
literature.Of course part of it had
to do with the fact that a new country by the name Azerbaijan
was formed in 1918 and the name persisted as Azerbaijan SSR during the USSR
era. Thus one argument was that since Nizami was from Ganja, then he is Azerbaijanian
(which he would have been from a citizenship perspective had he been born in
the 20th century and the concept of nation state existed! But it did
not exist in the 12 century!). This argument again is misplacing both time and
space. During Nizami Ganjavi’s time, the region was called Arran and in
general, the Islamic-Iranian culture was a continuously present throughout the
whole urban Eastern Muslim world, especially in the Caucasia.
Also as we mentioned, later on Azerbaijani despite the quotes we brought,
has taken to be equivalent to Turkic by some authors.

Interestingly
enough, the writer of the 1897 (Brockhaus and Efron) wrote “Persian and its
literature” in 1900 and also its third edition in 1912 all mentioning Nizami as
Persian poet.But because of the
political climate in 1939(see below and the Appendix), he wrote a monograph
“Nizami and his contemporaries” claiming:

“"We should fully realize and accept Azerbaijani Nizami,
of course, was true Azerbaijani poet,and Heroes" Leila and Majnun " is not the Arabs from an Arab
legend, but Turkic romantic heroes.””

Such
baseless claims like Lili o majnoon was a Turkic legend!Or Nizami was Azerbaijani poet (rather than
Persian poet) were made during the political atmosphere of 1930s and onward.

In
the book Russia and her Colonies, Walter Kolarz exposes the USSR’s
anti-Iranian schemes (both cultural and territorial) and support of irredentist
policy vis-à-vis Iranian Azerbaijan:

“Whilst trying to link Azerbaidzhani culture as closely as
possible with Russian culture, the Soviet regime is equally eager to deny the
existence of close cultural ties between Azerbaidzhan and Persia. The
fact that most of the great poets brought forth by Azerbaidzhan in the past
wrote mainly in Persian does not discourage the Soviet theoreticians, who are
working out the ideological basis of Soviet nationalities policy. They declare
categorically that everything produced by poets born in Azer­baidzhan ‘belongs
to the Azerbaidzhani people,’notwithstanding the language in which the works of
the so-called Azerbaidzhani poets were written. (46) According to this theory
the Persians have no right to claim any of the outstanding poets who had
written in the Persian language; if, nevertheless, they do advance such a claim
they are immediately branded as guilty of ‘pan-Iranianism’.

The attempt to ‘annex’ an important part of Persian
literature and to transform it into ‘Azerbaidzhani literature’ can be best
exemplified by the way in which the memory of the great Persian poet Nizami (1141-1203)
is exploited in the Soviet Union. The Soviet
regime does not pay tribute to Nizami as a great representative of world
literature, but is mainly interested in him as a ‘poet of the Soviet Union’,
which he is considered to be because he was born in Gandzha in the territory of
the present Azerbaidzhani Soviet Republic.
The Soviet regime proclaims its ownership over Nizami also by ‘interpreting’ his
works in accordance with the general pattern of Soviet ideology. Thus the
leading Soviet journal Bolshevik stressed that Nizami’s ‘great merit’consisted
in having undermined Islam by ‘opposing the theological teaching of the un­changeable
character of the world’. (47)

Stalin himself intervened in the dispute over Nizami and
gave an authoritative verdict on the matter. In a talk with the Ukrainian
writer, Mikola Bazhan, Stalin referred to Nizami as ‘the great poet of our
brotherly Azerbaidzhani people’ who must not be surrendered to Iranian
literature, despite having written most of his poems in Persian [Note by the author of the present article: It should be
noted that not a single verse of Turkish was ever written by Nizami and his
mother was Kurdish and his works point to a father of Iranic background]. Stalin even quoted to Bazhan a passage from Nizami where
the poet said that he was forced to use the Persian language because he was not
allowed to talk to the people in their native tongue [Note by the writer of this present article: Shirvanshahs
were not Turkic speaking and Nizami wrote his introduction after completing the
story of the Layli and Majnoon. The verse in question has to do with Ferdowsi
and Mahmud, and Nizami through the mouth of Shirvanshah’s versifies that we are
not unfaithful like Turks, so we need eloquent speech not low speech. This issue
has been expanded upon by the Iranian writer Abbas Zarin Khoi and this invalid
claim will be examined in detail later].
(48)

Thus in Stalin’s view Nizami is but a victim of Persian
centralism and of a denationalization policy directed against the ancestors of
the Azer­baidzhani Turks. Nizami is not a Persian poet, but a historical
witness of Persian oppression of ‘national minorities’. It is by no means sur­prising
that Stalin should take this line or that he should attach the greatest
importance to everything that would undermine Persia’s cul­tural and political
prestige. Stalin’s interest in Persia
is that of a Georg­ian rather than that of a Russian. In spite of being, as we
have seen, a bad Georgian nationalist in many other respects, he is animated as
far as Persia is concerned by a traditional Georgian animosity against the
‘hereditary enemy’. To gain economic and political influence in Persia is
traditional Russian policy ever since Peter the Great, but the Soviet
Government, thanks to Stalin’s influence, has done more than follow in the footsteps
of Czarist diplomacy.It has put into
effect new methods to disintegrate Persia, methods which only a
Caucasian neighbour of the Persians and an expert on nationality problems could
design.

THE OTHER AZERBAIDZHAN

Even before the Second World War the Soviet authorities of Moscow and Baku knew that
autonomist and separatist movements would emerge one day in Persia,
particularly among the Turks of Persian Azerbaidzhan.It was felt however that some time might
elapse before conditions would be ripe for launching a ‘national
liberation’campaign in Persia.
The organ of the Soviet of Nationalities, Revolyutsiya i Natsionalnosti, stated
as late as 1930 that the Azerbaidzhani Turks of Persia never ceased to consider
themselves as an integral part of the Pahlevi monarchy and continued to supply
both leaders and pioneers for the Persian national movement. However, the same
article forecast that the growth of Turkic culture in Soviet Azerbaidzhan and
the attraction of the Baku
oilfields would play their part in awakening the Turkic national consciousness
of the people of Persian Azerbaidzhan. (49)

The ‘awakening’of the Azerbaidzhani Turks came earlier than
the Soviet sociologists could have foreseen in 1930, and was a direct conse­quence
of the Russian military occupation of Northern Persia
of 1941-46. During this occupation the Persian Azerbaidzhani were brought into
close contact with the people of the Azerbaidzhani Soviet Republic, and it is
small wonder that the idea of a union took shape in the two Azerbaidzhans,
which, though widely differing economically and politically, are united by the
bond of a common language. With the assistance of the ‘brothers from the
North’this Turkic language - ignored under Persian rule - was given the first
place in education and administration all over Persian Azerbaidzhan. An
Azerbaidzhani university and an AzerbaidzhaniNationalMuseum
were opened; Azerbaidzhani books and newspapers were either printed on the spot
or imported from Soviet Azerbaidzhan. While contact between Tabriz,
the capital of Persian Azerbaidzhan, and Teheran was practically cut off; the
most advanced Turkic nationalists were encouraged to look to Baku for political and cultural inspiration.
Left-wing Azerbaidzhani poets praised Baku
with oriental hyperbole. One of them, Tavrieli, described Baku as the ‘Rose of
beauty graved in stone’and another, Muhammed Biriya, poet and also secretary of
the trade unions of Persian Azerbaidzhan, said he came to Baku to drink the ‘life-giving
water’of this city and that he wept ‘happy tears’on seeing Baku.(50)

In 1946, when the Soviet troops left Northern Persia, the
Persian Government only too easily swept away the regime set up by pro-com­munist
Azerbaidzhani autonomists in Tabriz.The nationalism of the Azerbaidzhani Turks of
Persia was still too feeble to put up a successful resistance even to a weak PersianState.The end of the Azerbaidzhani separatist government was, however, not the
end of the Azerbaidzhan problem.The
Soviet regime did its best to keep the issue alive both in Soviet ‘Northern
Azerbaidzhan’and in Persian ‘Southern Azerbaid­zhan’.
Soviet Azerbaidzhani poets and writers continued to deal in their works with
the problem of the unredeemed brothers in the South and thus to foster an
irredentist ideology among the people of the Azer­baidzhani S.S.R. On the other
hand communist refugees from Southern Azerbaidzhan were given shelter in Baku and were assisted in their efforts to keep in touch
with the Turkic-speaking people of Northern Persia.

(Walter
Kolarz., Russia
and her Colonies. London:
George Philip. I952.)

Indeed Stalin in his interview in April of
1939 expressed the opinion as noted by Kolarz:

“Comrade Stalin in an interview with the writers of
Azerbaijan (SSR) was talking about Nizami Ganjavi and brought some verses from
him in order to reject the fact that this poet of our brothers (he means the
Azerbaijan SSR) is part of Iranian/Persian literature, just due to the fact
that he has writtenmostof his work in
Persian”(Kolarz, Aghajanian)

We
note the amazing forgery here. Nizami Ganjavi does not have one verse of
Turkish. There is not a single non-Persian verse from Nizami Ganjavi. Yet
Stalin claims that Nizami Ganjavi was a victim of Persian oppression and only “most
of his work” (in reality all of his work) is in Persian.We note that the first verse in classical
Azerbaijani Turkish was written much later than Nizami’s passing away. It is
amazing that Nizami Ganjavi is not part of Persian literature according to the
chief USSR
ideologue, despite the fact that he wrote not “most”, but all of his work in
the Persian language and is known throughout the world for his quintuple
Persian masterpiece.

As Walter Kolarz has correctly noted:

The
attempt to ‘annex’ an important part of Persian literature and to transform it
into ‘Azerbaidzhani literature’can be best exemplified by the way in which the
memory of the great Persian poet Nizami (1141-1203) is exploited in the Soviet Union.

We may quote the modern Turkic nationalist
newspaper Ayna which regularly uses the term Persian Chauvinists(common amongst
pan-turkist nationalists)to describe
Iranians.The newspaper Aynastates:

“Ayna, Baku
10 Aug 04Now, let us have a brief look at Khatami's mistake. While on a trip to
Ganca, he wrote down his words and wishes in the visitors' book at the
world's renowned thinker Nizami Gancavi's mausoleum. There he called
Nizami a poet of "Persian literature". We have always boasted our
hospitality. This national value has always been a feature distinguishing
Azerbaijani Turks from others. Our ills
have often resulted from this feature. With his remarks Khatami proved
that he was a representative of the chauvinist Persian ideology masked
under the cover of democracy.”

Yet no one dispute Nizami wrote in
Persian and is part of Persian literature.Even Nizami himself says he is composing Persian literature and nowhere
does he use the term Turkish literature or any other ethno-linguistic term that
would imply it is not Persian literature.For example, when he was inspired and advised by the Prophet Khezr,
Nizami who calls the Persian language as Dorr-i-Dari (a term that was used at
least since the time of Nasir Khusraw) states in his Sharafnama:

چو در من گرفت
آن نصیحت‏گری
زبان برگشادم
به دّر دری

When all those advices were
accepted by me

I started composing in the Persian
Pearl (Dorr-i-Dari)

Or again for example in the Sharafnama
he states:

نظامی که
نظم دری کار
اوست

دری نظم
کردن سزاوار
اوست

Nizami whose endeavor is producing
Persian poetry (Nazm-e-Dari)

Versification of Persian(Dari
Nazm Kardan) poetry is what suits him

Nizami never says I have composed in “Turkish”
or “Azerbaijani literature”(a term that did not exist back then and
Azerbaijan at that time would be part of the geographical region of Iran and its
people would not be Turcophones at that time).He clearly states Nazm-e-Dari (Persian poetry).Parsi-i-Dari(term used by Ferdowsi) being the
Khurasani Persian.Nezami uses Parsi and
Dari sometimes interchangeably but other times, like Qatran Tabrizi, local
dialects were also called Parsi and this is distinguished within its own
context.

Professor. Gilbert Lazard, a famous
Iranologist and also the writer of Persian grammar states: "The language known as New Persian, which usually called
at this period by the name of Dari or Parsi-Dari,can be classified
linguistically as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and
literary language of Sassanian Iran, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the
language of the Achaemenids. Unlike the other languages and dialects, ancient
and modern, of the Iranian group such as Avestan, Parthian, Soghdian, Kurdish,
Pashto, etc., Old Middle and New Persian represent one and the same language at
three states of its history. It had its origin in Fars (the true Persian
country from the historical point of view and is differentiated by dialectical
features, still easily recognizable from the dialect prevailing in
north-western and eastern Iran".(Lazard, Gilbert 1975, “The Rise of
the New Persian Language” in Frye, R. N., The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol.
4, pp. 595-632, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Unfortunately, few people (some
politically minded and some ignorant) who cannot read Persian have started to
call Nizami Ganjavi’s poetry as something else rather than Persian literature.

Professor
Yuri Slezkine has given a more general description of that era of USSR
nation building as well a reference to Nizami Ganjavi:

….After the mid-1930s students, writers, and shock-workers
could be formally ranked - and so could nationalities. Second, if the
legitimacy of an ethnic community depended on the government’s grant of
territory, then the withdrawal of that grant would automatically “denationalize”
that community (though not necessarily its individual passport-carrying
members!). This was crucial because by the second half of the decade the
government had obviously decided that presiding over 192 languages and
potentially 192 bureaucracies was not a very good idea after all. The
production of textbooks, teachers and indeed students could not keep up with
formal “nationalization,”the fully bureaucratized command economy and the newly
centralized education system required manageable and streamlined communication
channels, and the self-consciously Russian “promotees”who filled the top jobs
in Moscow after the Great Terror were probably sympathetic to complaints of
anti-Russian discrimination (they themselves were beneficiaries of dass-based quotas).
By the end of the decade most ethnically defined Soviets, villages, districts
and other small units had been disbanded, some autonomous republics forgotten
and most “national minority’’schools and institutions closed down.

However - and this is the most important “however”of this
essay -the ethnic groups that already had their own republics and their own
extensive bureaucracies were actually told to redouble their efforts at
building distinct national cultures. Just as the “reconstruction of
Moscow”was changing from grandiose visions of refashioning the whole cityscape
to a focused attempt to create several perfect artifacts, so the nationality
policy had abandoned the pursuit of countless rootless nationalities in order
to concentrate on a few full-fledged, fully equipped “nations.”While the curtailment of ethnic quotas and
the new emphasis on Soviet meritocracy (“quality of cadres”) slowed down and
sometimes reversed the indigenization process in party and managerial
bureaucracies, the celebration of national cultures and the production of
native intelligentsias intensified dramatically.Uzbek communities outside Uzbekistan were left to their own devices but Uzbekistan as a
quasi-nation-state remained in place, got rid of most alien enclaves on its territory
and concentrated on its history and literature. The Soviet apartment as a whole
was to have fewer rooms but the ones that remained were to be lavishly
decorated with hometown memorabilia, grandfather clocks and lovingly preserved
family portraits.

Indeed, the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, which in many
ways inaugurated high Stalinism as a cultural paradigm, was a curiously
solemn parade of old-fashioned romantic nationalisms. Pushkin, Tolstoy and
other officially restored Russian icons were not the only national giants of
international stature - all Soviet peoples possessed, or would shortly
acquire, their own classics, their own founding fathers and their own
folkloric riches.The Ukrainian delegate
said that Taras Shevchenko was a “genius”and a “colossus” “whose role in the
creation of the Ukrainian literary language was no less important than
Pushkin’s role in the creation of the Russian literary language, and perhaps
even greater.”The Armenian delegate
pointed out that his nation’s culture was “one of the most ancient cultures of
the orient,” that the Armenian national alphabet predated Christianity and that
the Armenian national epic was “one of the best examples of world epic
literature” because of “the lifelike
realism of its imagery, its elegance, the profundity and simplicity of its
popular wisdom and the democratic nature of its plot.”The Azerbaijani delegate insisted that the Persian poet Nizami was actually a classic of Azerbaijani literature because he
was a “Turk from Giandzha” and that Mirza Fath Ali Akhundov was not a gentry
writer, as some proletarian critics had charged, but a “great
philosopher-playwright” whose “characters [were] as colorful, diverse and
realistic as the characters of Griboedov, Gogol’and Ostrovskii.”The Turkmen delegate told the Congress about
the eighteenth-century “ coryphaeus of Turkmen poetry,”Makhtum-Kuli; the Tajik
delegate explained that Tajik literature had descended from Rudaki, Firdousi,
Omar Khayyam and “other brilliant craftsmen of the world”; while the Georgian
delegate delivered an extraordinarily lengthy address in which he claimed that
Shot’ha Rust’haveli’s The Man in the Panther’s Skin was “centuries ahead
of west European intellectual movements,”infinitely superior to Dante and
generally “the greatest literary monument of the whole ... so-called medieval
Christian world.”

According to the new party line, all officially recognized
Soviet nationalities were supposed to have their own nationally defined “Great
Traditions”that needed to be protected, perfected and, if need be, invented
by specially trained professionals in specially designated
institutions.A culture’s “greatness” depended
on its administrative status (from the Union republics at the top to the
non-territorial nationalities who had but a tenuous hold on “culture”),but within a given category all national
traditions except for the Russian were supposed to be of equal value.
Rhetorically this was not always the case (Ukraine
was sometimes mentioned as second-in-command while central Asia
was often described as backward), but institutionally all national territories
were supposed to be perfectly symmetrical - from the party apparatus to the
school system. This was an old Soviet policy but the contribution of the 1930s
consisted in the vigorous leveling of remaining uneven surfaces and the equally
vigorous manufacturing of special - and also identical - culture-producing
institutions. By the end of the decade all Union republics had their own
writers’ unions, theaters, opera companies and national academies that
specialized primarily in national history, literature and language. Republican
plans approved by Moscow called for the production of ever larger numbers of
textbooks, plays, novels, ballets and short stories, all of them national in
form (which, in the case of dictionaries, folklore editions and the “classics”,
series came dangerously close to being in content as well).

….

Even in 1936-1939, when hundreds of alleged nationalists
were being sentenced to death “the whole Soviet country”was noisily celebrating
the 1000th anniversary of Firdousi, claimed by the Tajiks as one of
the founders of their (and not Persian) literature…

Professor
Bert G. Fragner has also examined the arbitrary decisions of central powers in
the USSR
to determine and make history for the purpose of nation building:

Peculiarities of Soviet Nationalism

If these were the basic requirements, we
should now look for the consequences. According to the Soviet concept, nations
had to have their own specific territories. Territorialism was obligatory
according to Stalin’s basic theses on the National Question. The Soviet
principle of territoriality clearly and outspokenly contradicts the theories of
Renner and Bauer, who rejected territorial requirements for national minorities
etc. Within the Soviet system, any decisions on the limita­tion of territory
were the exclusive prerogative of the central power in Moscow. Economic
considerations and planning were also largely concentrated in central hands.
The Soviet power created territories for created nations like planned habitats
or biotopes, according to their Utopian vision of human and social engineering.

This means that in Soviet
nationalism there was no place for direct political leadership towards national
independence, and no place for a nation’s independent economic growth.But there was an important task for potential
national leaders: to support distinct collective identi­fication with the
specific nation, that is, its territory, its (regulated, or at least
standardized) language, and its internal administration.This set of tasks was to be crowned by the development
of a specific and distinct culture within the Soviet frame, not to be confused
with others. Therefore, Soviet nationalism was less harmonizing than was widely
believed; it accepted inner-Soviet nationalist contradictions and dissent on
territories, divergent interpretations of the cultural heritage (such as: Was al-Farabi a Kazakh?
Was Ibn Sina (Avicenna) a Tajik or an Uzbek? To whom does al-Biruni
belong?)It was up to the central power
to solve these kinds of contradiction by arbitrary decisions. This makes clear
that Soviet nationalism was embedded into the political structure of what used
to be called ‘Democratic Centralism’. The territorial principle was extended to
all aspects of national histories, not only in space but also in time: ‘Urartu
was the oldest manifestation of a state not only on Armenian soil but
throughout the whole Union (and, therefore,
implicitly the earliest forerunner of the Soviet state)’, ‘Nezami from Ganja is
an Azerbaijani Poet’, and so on.The Georgian
linguist Nikolai Marr’s bizarre, not to say extre­mist, theoretical rejection
of any migrations in world history was, after some years of disastrous
consequences, officially rejected itself, during Stalin’s lifetime. In
practice, this concept never vanished from the national discourses in the Soviet Union, albeit on a scholarly or on a popular and
even folkloristic level.

We
note that Uzbekistan
still claims that Biruni is an Uzbek despite the fact that Biruni has a direct
statement saying the people of Chorasmia are a branch of Persian and it is
known that his language was the Chorasmian Iranian language (which he has left
important remnants of).He has
specifically mentioned that his native language was the Iranian Chorasmian
language.

J.G.
Tiwari has also summarized and examined the USSR nation building policies with
regards to Azerbaijan SSR.

(Excerpted
from Muslims Under the Czars and the Soviets by J.G. Tiwari, 1984, AIRP).

“Right on heels of October Revolution, the Bolsheviks in the
Russian dominated town of Baku
seized political power although they were in a minority [100] in the local
Soviet. But the nationalists led by their Mussavat Party overthrew that
government and set up their own independent government in its place in
November, 1918 [101]. The Eleventh Russian Soviet Army was sent to Baku to curb the
nationalists and seize power from them. On April 27, 1920 the nationalist
government was overthrown and Soviet authority was established [102] and the
army captured millions of puds of oil, according to April 28, 1920 telegram
sent to Moscow by Revolutionary War Council of the Eleventh Russian Soviet Army
concerning the liberation of Baku [103].

Immediately after this economic exploitation of Azerbajian
began. Oil drilling rapidly increased. Influx of Russian settlers to Baku was accelerated. By
1934, only one out of five oil workers was the Azerbaijani Turk. In 1949
Russian was the language employed in most of the schools [104]. The economy of Azerbaijan
being mostly agricultural, emphasis was given on increasing the area under
cotton cultivation. Between 1913 and 1938 the area under cotton increased by 90
per cent while that under wheat shrunk by 12 per cent and that under rice
cultivation by 48 percent. There was popular opposition to cotton growing. Even
the Communist Party organization in villages and rural districts sabotaged the
instructions which Baku
authorities issued for the implementation of the cotton plan [105]. Coercion
was employed to extend cotton area, to set up collective farms and to implement
alphabet revolution.

Within the Communist Party, opposition arose against
Russification and economic exploitation of Azerbaijan. Between 1921 and 1925,
this opposition was led by Sultangaliyevists who were working within the party
under the leadership of Narimanov. The deviationists were liquidated. This was
followed by another similar revolt in the party led by Khanbudagovism demanding
the end of Russian colonization and the replacement of Turkic workers by
Non-Turkic workers. Beria, the NKVD Chief was specially sent there in the
thirties who took a “merciless part in unmasking and extermination of the
Trotskyite-Bukharinist and bourgeois-nationalist deviationists in the country
[106].

Azerbaijan history was re-written to establish the existence of strong
friendly relations between Russia
and Azerbaijan in the past
and to deny close cultural ties with Persia
of which for hundreds of years Azerbaijan
was an integral part. Vigorous attempts were made to snap Azerbaijan’s cultural ties with Iran.

A striking example of Soviet attempts to snap the cultural
ties between Azerbaijan and Persia
was their treatment of Nizami, one of the most outstanding Persian poets. Since
Nizami was born in a place that now falls within Soviet Azerbaijan, their
propagandists claimed that Nizami belonged to Soviet Azerbaijan. The Soviet
regime went to the extent of proclaiming that Nizami’s works were in accordance
with Soviet ideology. Their leading journal Bolshevik stressed that Nizami’s
‘great merit’consisted in having undermined Islam [107]. Stalin referred to
Nizami ‘as the great poet of our brotherly Azerbaijan people’who must not be
surrendered to Iranian literature, despite having written most of his poems in
Persian. Stalin even quoted passages from Nizami showing that he was forced to
write in Persian language because he was not allowed to talk to his people in
their native language [108]. He emphasized the view that Nizami was a victim of
Persian oppression of Azerbaijanis and he opposed Persian oppression of
minorities.

New generation of Azerbaijan
poets has cropped whose main theme is that Azerbaijanis in Persia live
under oppression while the people of Soviet Azerbaijan live a prosperous life.
One Azerbaijani poet in one of his works puts the following words in the mouth
of Stalin:

From here the light will burst in living torrents, On Araby,
Afghanistan and Iran; and dawn will bathe the Orient tomorrow, From this thy
land, the happiest of lands [109].

The objective of Soviet literature and propaganda in Azerbaijan is to alienate the Azerbaijanis from Tehran, from Iran’s
religion and culture and to encourage people to look to Baku
and not Tehran
for cultural and political inspiration.

Since the very inception of Bolshevik regime Baku and Azerbaijan
have been used as instruments for Soviet expansionist aims. Baku
is the venue of the SovietUniversity of the Peoples of the East where cadres
are trained for work beyond the southern borders of Soviet
Union. In 1921 and 1941, twice Soviet army in Azerbaijan aggressed on Iran and made abortive attempts to
set up puppet Soviet regimes there. As early as 1930, the organ of the Soviet
Nationalities, Revolyutsiyai Natsionalnost i, complained that Azerbaijan Turks
consider themselves as integral part of Pahelvi’s monarchy and forecasted that
in due course of time Baku would play an important role in bringing about a new
consciousness among Turks of Persian Azerbaijan, [110] in other words implying
that Baku would be used as a propaganda centre for instigating Communist
revolts in Iran. These endeavours have been reinforced by the recurrent theme
of Soviet propagandists and litterateurs that their brothers in Persian
Azerbaijan should be redeemed. In this way an irredentist ideology has been
kept alive in Soviet Azerbaijan. Soviet Azerbaijan is the sanctuary of
Iranian Communists and a centre for funding the Iranian Communist Party. On its
Iranian border is positioned a radio station, called the National Voice of Iran
which beams communist propaganda to Iran. As many as 28 Soviet
divisions are stationed for action in Iran
[111] and this border is connected by road net-works with the metropolitan
cities of Soviet Union. In other words Soviet
Azerbaijan is being keyed to play a vital role in the realization of Soviet
plan to reach Gulf waters. Communist Party of Azerbaijan remained an important
source of help for Afghan communists before they took over.

Because of the iron curtain the outside world knows very
little of the current popular reaction to Soviet regime in Azerbaijan, but
the following two reports in ABN Correspondence can serve as an indication:

“The Daily Telegraph dated May 22 1973 reported that the
nationalist upsurge has taken place in Ukraine. Recently two writers have
been sentenced to 7 and 5 years forced labour, respectively, for participating
in activities of a ‘national cultural movement’. There has been considerable
national and religious uprising in Latvia and Lithunia. Similar
activities are evident in Tadzhikstan, Azerbaijan and Turkestan.
[112]

“The underground radio stations’are known to exist in Georgia, Azerbaijan,
Lithunia, Uzbekistan
and Ukraine.”[113]

An
example of nation building process is also given by Ismet Cherif Vanly in his
article describes the official state policy (which was really part of the USSR
policy of assimilating smaller groups into larger groups):

“Not only did Turkey and Azerbaijan pursue an identical policy, both employed identical techniques, e.g. forced assimilation, manipulation of population
figures, settlement of non-Kurds in areas predominantly Kurdish,
suppression of publications and abolition
of Kurdish as a medium of instruction in schools. A familiar Soviet technique was also used:
Kurdish historical figures such as Sharaf Khan of Bitlis and
Ahmad Khani and the Shaddadid dynasty as a whole were described as Azeris.
Kurds who retained “Kurdish”as their nationality on their internal passports as opposed to
“Azeri”were unable to find employment.”

It
should be pointed out that during the decay and finally the demise of the USSR,
some notable Russian scholars have spoken about the political attempt of
detaching Nizami Ganjavi from Persian literature and the wider Iranian culture
and civilization.

The
late Professor Igor M. Diakonoff gives a background on his writing of the book
History of Media and he clearly states as he always had maintained that the
Medes were Iranians. He also gives his impression on the 800th
anniversary celebration of Nizami Ganjavi. He gives an overview of the USSR
nation building.

Our faculty at the University, as I already mentioned, was
closed “for Zionism”. There was only one position left open (“History of the
Ancient East”) which and I have conceded to Lipin, not knowing for sure then,
that he was an (secret service) informer, and was responsible for death of
lovely and kind Nika Erschovich. But Hermitage salary alone was not enough for
living, even combined with what Nina earned, and I, following to an advice from
a pupil of my brother Misha, Lesha Brstanicky, [signed a contract and] agreed
to write “History of the Media”for Azerbaijan. All they searched for more
aristocratic and more ancient ancestors, and Azerbaijanis hoped, that Medes
were their ancient ancestors.

The staff of Institute
of History of Azerbaijan resembled me a good
panopticon. All members had appropriate social origin and were party members
(or so it was considered); few could hardly talk Persian, but basically all
were occupied by mutual eating (office politics). Characteristic feature: once,
when we had a party (a banquet) in my honor at the Institute director’apartment
(who, if I am not wrong, was commissioned from a railway related-job), I was
amazed by fact that in this society consisted solely of Communist party
members, there were no women. Even the mistress of the house appeared only once
about four o’clock in the morning and has drunk a toast for our health with a
liqueur glass, standing at the doors.

The majority of employees of the Institute had very distant relation to
science. Among other guests were my friend Lenja Bretanitsky (which, however,
worked at other institute), certain complacent and wise old man, who according
to rumors, was a red agent during Musavatists time, one bearer of hero of
Soviet Union medal, Arabist, who later become famous after publication of one
scientific historical medieval, either Arabic, or Persian manuscript, from
which all quotes about Armenians were removed completely; besides that there
were couple of mediocre archeologists; the rest were [Communist] party
activists, who were commissioned to scientific front.

Shortly before that celebrations of a series of
anniversaries of great poets of the USSR people started. Before the war
a celebration of Armenian epos hero of David of Sassoon anniversary took place
(epos’date was unknown, though). I caught only the end of the celebrations in
1939 while participating in the expedition, excavating Karmir Blur [in Armenia]. And
it was planned an anniversary of the great poet Nizami celebration in Azerbaijan.
There were slight problems with Nizami - first of all he was not Azeri but Persian
(Iranian) poet, and though he lived in presently Azerbaijani city of Ganja, which, like many
cities in the region, had Iranian population in Middle Ages. Second, according to the ritual, it was required to place a
portrait of the poet on a prominent place, and whole building in one of the
central areas of Baku
was allocated for a museum of the paintings illustrating Nizami poems.

Problem was that the Koran strictly forbids any images of
alive essences, and nor a Nizami portrait, neither paintings illustrating his
poems existed from Nizami’s time.

So Nizami portrait and paintings illustrating his poems were
ordered three months before celebrations start. The portrait has been delivered
to the house of Azerbaijan
Communist Party first secretary Bagirov, local Stalin. He called a Middle Ages
specialist from the Institute
of History, drew down a
cover from the portrait and asked:
- Is it close to original?
- Who is the original? - the expert has shy mumbled. Bagirov has reddened
from anger.
- Nizami!
- You see, - the expert told, - they have not created portraits in Middle Ages
in the East...

All the same, the portrait occupied a central place in
gallery. It was very difficult to imagine more ugly collection of ugly, botched
work, than that which was collected on a museum floor for the anniversary.

I could not prove to Azeris, that Medes were their
ancestors, because, after all, it was not so. But I wrote “History of the
Media”, big, detailed work. Meanwhile, according to the USSR law a person could
not have more than one job, so I was forced to leave (without a regret)
Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, and, alas, the Hermitage, with its scanty
earnings. For some period I worked at Leningrad’s
Office of History museum…

(It
should be noted that Diakonoff here considers Azeris as equivalent to a Turkic
group, where-as in this author’s opinion, Azeri’s have a considerable Iranic
heritage and thus the Medes and their civilization are part of the broader
Iranic heritage of Azeris as well. This is what Prof. Planhol has called a
multi-secular symbiosis. It is noteworthy that the whole concept of USSR
nation building is succinctly described by one of its greatest historians
(Diakonov).

Original
Russian of Professor Diakonov (this author does not speak Russian and thanks
the anonymous friend who helped him by translating it and the translation was
checked via computerized translator):

Another
Russian scholar that can be mentioned Victor A. Shnirelman, who received his
Ph.D. in History and is a leading scientist of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian
Academy of Sciences.He has
published studies and articles on interethnic relations and conflicts, and
focused on Russian nationalist ideologies and anti-Semitism from the historical
and current perspectives. He teaches the sociology of interethnic relations and
nationalism, as well as an introduction to the History
of anti-Semitism at the Jewish University of Moscow.

By that time, already mentioned Iranian and Armenian
factors contributed to the rapid azerbaijanization of historical heroes and
historical political entities on the territory of Azerbaijan.
In particular, in 1938, Nizami in connection with his 800-year anniversary was
declared a genius(marvelous) Azerbaijani poet (History, 1939. Pp 88-91). In
fact, he was a Persian poet, which is not surprising, because the urban
population in those years was Persian (Dyakonov, 1995. page. 731). At one time
it was recognized by all Encyclopedic Dictionaries of published in Russia, and only the Big Soviet Encyclopedia for the
first time in 1939, announced Nizami as a "Great Azerbaijani poet (Sr.
Brockhaus and Efron, 1897. page. 58; Garnet, 1917. page. 195 ; BSE, 1939. p.
94).

" We trained such specialists, but, as shown by our
communication with them, there are a lot of nationalistic tendencies there and
academic fraud. Apparently it's related to the first years of independence.
Their works include nationalist beginnings. Objective perspective,
scientific understanding of the problems and timeline of historical
developments are lacking. Sometimes there is an outright falsification.
For example, Nizami, the monument of whom was erected at Kamennoostrovsk
boulevard, is proclaimed Great Azerbaijani poet. Although he did not even speak
Azeri. They justify this by saying that
he lived in the territory of current Azerbaijan, but Nizami wrote his
poems in Persian language!”

Overall,
it seems the political detachment of Nezami Ganjavi from Iranian civilization
is recognized by authors who write about the former USSR:Yo'av Karny, “Highlanders
: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory”, Published by Macmillan,
2000.Pg 124: “In
1991 he published a translation into Khynalug of the famous medieval poet
Nezami, who is known as Persian but is claimed by Azeri nationalists as their
own.”

Another
Russian scholar, by the name of Mikhail Kapustin in 1988 (during the time when
the USSR
was opening up to the world and there was no pressure on scholars to manipulate
fact) wrote in the cultural magazine of Soviets:

Nizami Ganjavi is one of the greatest thinkers and poets of
the middle ages and belongs to the exceptional heritage of Persian literature
of Iran.
He had no connection with the current culture of Azarbaijan. And Azerbaijanis
are making a useless effort to claim him as one of their own. At the time of
Nizami, Azeri-Turks did not exist in that land.

(Sovietkaya
Kultura (Soviet Culture) magazine, 27 of December, 1988).

This
author does not agree with Mikhail Kapustin in terms of not having any
connection with the culture of Azerbaijan.
Nizami Ganjavi has influenced the whole realm of Islamic literature and he is
also part of the Iranian heritage of the Republic of Azerbaijan. At the
same time, the folklore of Nizami Ganjavi is based on Persian (Sassanid,
Shahnameh) and Iranian folklore (with the exception of the case of Layli o
Majnoon which was a Persianized version of an original Arab story) and not
Turkmen/Oguz folklore like those of Dede Qorqud or Grey-Wolves. Nizami
Ganjavi’s epics are not based on Turkic themes. It is also important to
emphasize that the two major influences on Nizami were Sanai and Ferdowsi. So
Nizami Ganjavi is part of the Iranian heritage of Iranian people and people
that also have Iranian heritage including Azerbaijanis. The view of Diakonof
and Kapustin put Nizami Ganjavi in Iranian civilization.

For
example, a relatively nationalistic website mentions:

“The original opera had been based on “Kaveh, the
Blacksmith”. However, such a plot would absolutely have jeopardized their
lives. First of all, it was based on a foreign tale: Kaveh was a mythical
figure of ancient Persia,
memorialized by 10th century Ferdowsi in Persian verse in the “Shahnameh”(Book
of the Kings)”

On
the other hand, Nizami Ganjavi has mentioned dozens of Shahnameh figures in his
Panj-Ganj or Khamseh (these is a small section on this in this
article). He has written that he considers himself a successor and inheritor of
Ferdowsi. He has never mentioned once a symbol from Turkish mythology like
those of Grey Wolf, Dede Qorqud, Oghuz-nama and other myths/folklore of Turkic
groups. Ferdowsi is widely praised and used by Nizami Ganjavi, yet a
nationalist journal claims Ferdowsi’s work is a foreign tale. So a minority of
the modern intellectuals (from both Iranian Azerbaijan and the Republic of
Azerbaijan) identify themselves solely with Oghuz Turks and even if there are
strong Iranic elements in the history of Azerbaijan and the Caucasia (like
Masud ibn Namdar, Nasir ad-din Tusi, Bahmanyar, Nizami Ganjavi, Zoroaster,
Medes, Parthians, Achaemenids), some of these intellectuals will either dismiss
them or attempt to Turkify them if possible.

Alexander
Otarovich Tamazshvilli worked as one of the scholar in the Russian institute of
Oriental studies in St. Petersburg until his retirement.He has written two important articles on the
politicization of Nezami and USSR views on the Persian culture heritage.This author through a friend that spoke
Russian as good as a native speaker had a chance to ask him several questions
through the phone.We obtained his phone
number through the Russian institute of Oriental Studies and unfortunately he
did not use email.

Question:Your two articles on politicization of Nezami
are very important.Can they be
translated?

Answer:Yes of course.

Question:Do you have an e-mail?

Answer:No I do not use e-mail but I
can give you my address for furtherquestions.

Question:Do you think Nezami was Iranian or
Azerbaijani Turkic?Because in your article
you mention that the overwhelming orientalist scholars consider him Persian,
yet you mention that the USSR results could have been reached later, but they
came during his 800th anniversary?

Answer:I am not a scholar Nezami or
ancient history of the East.Rather I
study the politicization and USSR politics.So I have no position on the ethnicity or cultural attribution of
Nezami.

Question:Do you think that the republic of Azerbaijan
will reconsider its position on Nezami?

Answer: No.Nezami is a very
important figure for Azerbaijani nation building.Thus the view that he is an Azerbaijani will
remain there for the foreseeable future.

Anyhow,
despite Dr. Tamazshvilli not taking a position himself (which is reasonable
since he did not consider himself an expert), he has two articles which reveal
how Nezami was politicized and used for nation building.We should recall though that in the USSR era especially
1940-1970’s, the term “Azerbaijani” was not equivalent to Turkic rather it
meant primarily a synthesis of Iranian (Medes) and Caucasian Albanians.Indeed the USSR Great Soviet Encyclopedia
mentions the Avesta as the oldest form of Azerbaijani literature, where the
Avesta is in an Iranian language and the correct term would be Iranian literature.

Dr.
Tamazshvilli wrote two important articles and here we provide translations of both
articles where it concerns politicization of Nezami.Dr. Tamazshivilli himself though took no
position on the actual background of Nezami in our interview and said he is not
an expert in ancient history or Persian literature.

Article
1:

Tamazshvilli
A.O. “From the History of Study of Nezami-ye Ganjavi in the USSR:

However
the articles of Tamazshvilli speak for themselves.They clearly show that the USSR scholarship
was concerned about nation building.Indeed scholars such as E.E. Bertels were affected by political
decisions.

One of the most
glaring and remarkable cultural and socio-political events of the USSR in the
autumn of 1940 was supposed to have been the 800th anniversary of
the poet and thinker, Nezami-ye Ganjavi.The war pushed the festivities six years back until the autumn of 1947.

This long (from 1937
to 1947) anniversary campaign, in which many scholars – Orientalists, literary
people, and politicians – took part, gave good results.In the boundary of 1930s and 1940s, its
active participant, E.E. Bertels said, “real scholarly study of Nezami can only
be done in our time.”[1]He himself concluded that “Only twenty years
ago all the literature on Nezami in Russian language was based on few articles
mostly of bibliographic character.The
800th anniversary of the Great Azerbaijani thinker and poet in all
the corners of our Homeland has basically changed this situation.”[2]Main, revolutionary result of this campaign
for our native scholarship became attributing Nezami as an Azerbaijani poet,
and his works as achievements of the Azerbaijani literature, while in the realm
of the world Oriental Studies (and prior to this in the Soviet as well), the
viewpoint of him as a representative of Persian literature.

……

Political content of
the Soviet Nezami-studies was left out of the view of the historians of the
native scholarship, including the biographers of E.E. Bertels.Moreover, the question of nationality of
Nezami and his works, other than scholarly aspects, had clear political
aspects; and a scholarly based answer to this question is an important
political meaning which was based on the creation of the Azerbaijani SSR.[3]Therefore, from beginning to the end of
Nezami’s 800th anniversary campaign, scholarship and politics went hand-in-hand,
supporting and directing each other; but it seems that politics still had a
more important role.This was stipulated
by a number of objective and subjective reasons.

Nezami deserved an
anniversary in any case, which seemed to have an evident benefit to
scholarship.There was a precedent as
well – in 1934, the 1000th birth anniversary of the classic of
Persian literature, Ferdowsi, was held in the USSR.However, having the anniversary of Nezami,
while presenting him with the same qualities, would not have been objectively
expedient.

The second half of the
1930s became a period of national literary anniversaries.: In 1937, 750th
anniversary of Shota Rustaveli’s poem, “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”; in
1938, 750th anniversary of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”; in 1939,
1000th anniversary of the Armenian epic, “David of Sasun.”These anniversaries were held in the
Azerbaijani SSR as well.If Azerbaijan
would not propose a similar anniversary, both from chronological as well as
cultural perspective, it could have been an argument for beliefs (and not only
from a narrow-minded level) about historically formed backwardness of the
Azerbaijanis and their national culture in comparison to the Persians,
Georgians, and Armenians.This is
supported by a reference to Nezami and his works during the anniversary
campaign and the controversy on the development level of Azerbaijan in the 12th
century; but later on this.

“Celebrating the 800th
anniversary of the birth of Nezami is a huge achievement of our people in the
area of cultural buildup,” was said in Azerbaijan.[4]

The loud anniversary
of an Azerbaijani poet of the middle ages was, for the current situation, vital
in the interests of the policy of harmonizing international relations in the
South Caucasus, which was being held by the Soviet government and the ACP(b)
(All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)).

The First Secretary of
the CC CP(b) (Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolsheviks)) of the
Azerbaijani SSR of those years, M.D. Baqerov, had very strong anti-Iranian
feelings, and undoubtedly was a patriot of Azerbaijan, although a one who could
get carried away.[5]It is enough to say that in the Resolution of
the 14th Convention of the CP(b) of the Azerbaijani SSR, which was
accepted due to Baqerov’s speech, demanded “foundational improvements in the
teaching of the Azeri language, while clearing it out of Arabisms, Farsisms,
Ottomanisms, etc.”[6]Baqerov tried to attentively follow the study
of history and culture of the peoples of Caucasus and South Caucasus, and
actively struggled against situations that seemed wrong and ideologically
fallacious to him.One such situation
surely was the statement that Nezami is a Persian poet.Mostly, due to M.D. Baqerov, the anniversary
was very successful.

It must be admitted
that Baqerov was left in a difficult situation, when the problem of a literary
anniversary appeared for Azerbaijan.The
question of Nezami, as it was put in the Republic, in the 1930s, was a question
that did not only concern, or was in the level, of the Republic.His decision was outside of the competency of
the leadership of the Azerbaijani SSR.The attempt to reconsider the nationality of Nezami and his works in the
interests of Azerbaijan, could have been viewed by the official Moscow as
demonstration of nationalist tendencies – an attempt to “better” the past of
the Azerbaijani people, strengthen the authority of the Republic in the
determent of the historical truth.

How definitely and
harshly the political leadership of the USSR struggled with the displays of
nationalism, as well as nationalists, was perfectly known.Objections from scholars could be expected as
well, primarily from the Leningrad specialists, who created the trend for the Soviet
literary Orientalism.However, it
worked; and the “transfer” of Nezami as an Azerbaijani poet was done in a very
well thought manner, fast, persistently, but properly, and overall, even
elegantly.But everything started with a
scandal.

It was planned that in
1938, there would be a decade of the Azerbaijani art in Moscow, for which the
Republic had decided to prepare an “Anthology of Azerbaijani Poetry” in
Russian.The first version of the
anthology, which was supposed to present “the greatest masters – the creators
of the Azerbaijani poetry,” the inclusion of Nezami’s poetry was not
considered.This was the case in May,
1937.[7]But already on August 1, the press reported
that the two-year work on translating poetry for the Anthology is over, and the
Russian reader can become acquainted with the monumental poetry of Nezami.“At some point, the dirty hand of the enemies
of the people was placed on the Anthology […] they did everything so that the
Anthology looked perhaps more skinny and decrepit,” reported the newspaper.[8]But there are not enough bases to argue that
the decision to include the poetry of Nezami was based purely on the political
basis.Argument for this decision could
have been the view of the Soviet Orientalist, Yu.N. Marr on Nezami.In one of his works, he had stated that as
soon as he started researching Rustaveli, Khaqani, and Nezami, and their
epochs, he right away was convinced that “the epoch and authors are in a
disgracefully neglected situation.”[9]Back in 1929, Yu.N. Marr asserted that
“Nezami is its own for Caucasus, especially for the ethnic group that has kept
the Persian tradition in its literature until recently, i.e. for Azerbaijan,
where the Ganjian poet is more respected than in Persia.”[10]Of course, “its own for Azerbaijan” is not
the same as “Azerbaijani,” but in the middle of 1937, Marr who had died in
1935, was the only Soviet Orientalist on whose research could the proponents of
the view of Nezami as an Azerbaijani poet lean.It must be noted that luck was on their side as a whole, and especially
because it was Yuriy Marr in Particular who spoke of Nezami.His scholarly reputation in the eyes of the
political leadership of the country must have been somehow connected with the
reputation of his father – Academician N.Ya. Marr, whose name was very authoritative
in those years in the Soviet scholarship, as well as in the Party circles.The rays of father’s popularity fell on the
son too.

They did not fail to
tie the name of N.Ya. Marr with the Nezami-studies in Azerbaijan:“Special merit in the revision of the
scholarly understanding of Nezami is owed to the Azerbaijani scholars,
Academician N.Ya. Marr, Professor Yu.N. Marr, and others.They hold the merit of revising the
Bourgeoisie Oriental scholarship, which has distorted the image of the
Azerbaijani poet…”[11]This reference to Marr appeared more for
political reasons, because there were no direct statements of the scholar that
Nezami is an Azerbaijani poet.

The Institute of
History, Language and Literature of the Azerbaijani Branch of the Academy of Sciences
of the USSR started working on the study and the preparation of publication of
the works of Nezami Ganjavi, who from 1937 was confidently referred to as the
great classic of the Azerbaijani literature.[12]In the published materials in Azerbaijan in the
second half of 1937, where Nezami is mentioned, his name and works are often
closely tied to the name and works of Shota Rustaveli.Showing the speech by an Azerbaijani literary
in a ceremonial plenum of the Baku Municipal Soviet of Deputies of the Workers
for the 750th anniversary of the poem, “The Knight in the Panther’s
Skin” of is a good example.“Comrade
Merza Ebrahimov names the classics of the Azerbaijani literature – Nezami and
Khaqani – that lived and created in the epoch of Rustaveli, who were struggling
for the same high ideals and aspirations, which were geniusly sang by the great
Shota, and which were realized only in our Stalin epoch.”[13]The name of Rustaveli here helps give the
basic idea about the consonance of the works and ideas of Nezami with the ideas
of the Stalin epoch more tacitly, and consequently some ideas of Stalin
himself.The support of Moscow is
extremely important in the Azerbaijani decision of the Nezami question.

Next year of 1938
became the year when the USSR once and for all ended the “negligence” of
Nezami.The Decade of Azerbaijani Arts
was passing with great success in Moscow from 5th to the 15th
of April of 1938.In Baku, the
“Azerneshr” publishing published 700 remembrance copies of the “Anthology of
the Azerbaijani Poetry,” where there were Nezami Ganjavi’s poems translated by
Konstantin Simonov.The editor of the
anthology was only one – V. Lugovskiy.It is logical to conclude that the other two – Samed Vurgun and S.
Shamilov – were removed in 1937 as those who were not able to work, but it is
presumed that the reason was not only this.According to some sources the anthology had a second editor as well –
Merza Ebrahimov (Esmail Merza Azhdar-Zadeh), who was already the Head of the
Department for Arts Affairs under the Soviet People’s Committee [Ministry ] of
the Azerbaijani SSR, but his name was not in the book either.[14]The reason that the name of high ranking
officials disappeared from the list of editors of the anthology was probably
because the work was supposed to look as a result of the initiative and work of
only creative intelligentsia of Azerbaijan and Russia.Moreover, the work done only by (only on the
surface) non-Azerbaijani poets is harder to consider a nationalist view of
Nezami.The anonymous foreword to the
Anthology says, “Among the Azerbaijani poets of the 12th century,
Nezami is highly regarded,” but this assertion is not backed by anything.[15]

The publication of
this anthology was a crafty tactical move to make a decision about Nezami’s
situation.Undoubtedly, this book was
being given to the members of the government of the USSR and the leadership of
the ACP(b), who showed lively interest in the Decade of the Azerbaijani Art,
among whom was Stalin.If anything in
the contents of the “Anthology of the Azerbaijani Poetry” (for example,
assertion on the national belongingness of Nezami) would bring about objection
and politicized criticism “from above,” the fault for the publishing of a
flawed book would remain on the leadership of the Azerbaijani SSR; however,
there were no proofs that their views on Nezami were reflected in the book.

However, exposing
these views with full manifest, as with the authors of the foreword in the
Anthology, would not be too hard.But,
evidently, there were no questions or objections to the contents of the
Anthology.In any way, the first edition
of the “Anthology of the Azerbaijani Poetry” had a strange fate.It is unlikely that the Anthology remained
practically unknown to the literary people and scholars; however, for some
reason people did not talk much about it.The short essay, “Nezami Ganjavi,” which was part of the foreword in the
book, is not mentioned in the work of Rostam Aliev, “Nezami: A Short
Bibliographic Reference” (Baku, 1982) either.

On the day of the
opening of the Decade, Pravda [“The Truth” – official Communist Party of
the USSR Publication] had an editorial, “The Art of the Azerbaijani
People.”It stated, “Back in the age of
the feudal lawlessness, the Azerbaijani people gave birth to the greatest
artists.The names of Nezami, Khaqani,
Fuzuli of Baghdad are on par with the Persian poets Saadi and Hafez.Nezami, Khaqani, and Fuzuli were flaming
patriots of their people who were serving the foreign newcomers, only under
pressure.”[16]The meaning of the article is hard to
overstate for the “repatriation” of Nezami to Azerbaijan.This was a proof that the official Moscow
agreed with the decision made in the Azerbaijani SSR on Nezami.

On the next day, April
6, 1938, “The Baku Worker” republished the article from Pravda (which
strengthened its meaning for the Republic).From this moment on, the official Baku every time would demonstrate that
gave up the initiative to Moscow, and the course of the 800th
Anniversary of Nezami is coming from Moscow.

On April 18, 1938, Pravda
came out with “The Triumph of the Azerbaijani Art.”“But despite all the prohibitions and
persecutions, in defiance of victimizations, the heroic Azerbaijani people
would bring out those who expressed their rebellious, courageous, and angry
spirits.Back in the age of the feudal
lawlessness, the Azerbaijani people gave birth to such greatest artists as
Nezami, Khaqani, Fuzuli.They were
flaming patriots of their people, the champions of freedom and independence of
their country.”This was a better
reference of Nezami by Pravda.[17]It seems that the poet no longer served the
foreign newcomers.

In the preparations of
this material, it should be assumed, the Azerbaijani side took part with the
leadership of Baqerov and Ebrahimov, who were part of the delegation to Moscow
of Azerbaijan to the Decade of the Azerbaijani Art.Only Baqerov could coordinate the publication
of these articles in different instances.

But whoever has
written them, they reflected the official viewpoint of the CC ACP(b); this was
the meaning of the writings of Pravda.Only a select few Orientalists could contend the viewpoints, but they
did not do it, maybe because the question of Nezami was quite contesting even
before Pravda’s publication.Here
we can refer to the interpretations of Yu.N. Marr and A.N. Boldyrev.[18]In the end of the 1940s, Bertels asserted
that “Back in 1938, it was evident to me that groundlessly ascribing the whole
of great, colossal Persian literature to Iran is not only wrong, but the largest
mistake.The Persian language was used
by many people, which was the mother tongue of a completely different system.”[19]It is quite possible that the reason for
Bertels’ review of his former views on Nezami, whom he considered a Persian
poet only in 1935-1936, was the publication in Pravda.

A viewpoint was said
in our scholarly literature that “E.E. Bertels publicly called Nezami an
Azerbaijani poet earlier than anyone.”[20]However, as the deeper research of the
question showed, the conclusion that Nezami is an Azerbaijani poet, was done by
the scholars, literary people, and politicians of Azerbaijan without much
concern for the view of their Russian colleagues, and before E.E. Bertels.

On May 9, 1938,
another “Anthology of the Azerbaijani Poetry,” which was under the edition of
the same V. Lugovskiy and Samed Vurgun, was given to print to the Moscow State
Publishing House of the Artistic Literature.It also had the foreword, “The Poetry of the Azerbaijani People”, which
showed the authors – Azerbaijani literary people and scholars, G. Arasly, M.
Aref, and M. Rafili.Evidently, it was
mentioned before the Decade of the Azerbaijani Art in Moscow – “A mass
publication of the Anthology is being published in Moscow.”[21]

The initiators of the
review of national belongingness of Nezami were ready for good and bad luck.

The textual closeness
of the two texts, one of which was published in Baku and the other in Moscow,
of the “Anthology of the Azerbaijani Poetry,” shows that the group of writers
was the same or almost the same.The
Moscow version of the Anthology was signed only two days left to a year later –
May 7, 1937 – and the reason is not known.

The initiators of the
campaign for the 800th Anniversary of Nezami waited a long time for
the scholarly circles of Leningrad and Moscow to make a clear statement on the
poet.

On May 8, 1938, the
Council of the People’s Commissars [The Council of Ministers ] of the USSR,
which was looking over the working plan of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR,
decided not to approve the plan and return it for further deliberation to the
Academy of Sciences.[22]

On May 17, 1938, there
was a state banquet for the workers of the Highest School.Stalin made a small speech, rather a toast at
the banquet, where he said, “For the flourishing of sciences, those sciences,
the people of which, while understanding the power and meaning of the
scientific traditions and using them for the interests of sciences, still do
not want to be slaves of these traditions; which has courage, resolution to break
the old traditions, norms and arrangements when they become old, when they
become breaks for movement forward; and the one that can create new traditions,
new norms, new arrangements.”[23]All of this could be used for the study of
Nezami.

On July 25, 1938, the
Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR once again gave a negative vote to
the working plan of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.[24]The Presidium, while reviewing already the
third version of the plan, on September 11, 1938, mentioned that “The scholarly
councils of the institutes did not mobilize the whole collective of the workers
for the struggle to fulfill the sayings of Comrade Stalin to develop and
strengthen progressive sciences.”They
proposed that the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of
the USSR enter the preparation of a scientific monograph on the “life and works
of the great Azerbaijani poet, Nezami.”[25]This meant the official recognition of Nezami
Ganjavi as an Azerbaijani poet, as well as the Academy of Sciences as whole,
and the Institute of the Oriental Studies.The question of national belongingness of Nezami seemed decided
completely.Pravda “canonized” the view
of Nezami as a poet – a patriot of Azerbaijan, who was not spiritually broken
with the most difficult situations.In
the XIV Convention of the CP(b) of the Azerbaijani SSR, M.D. Baqerov referred
to the 12th century as the “golden age of the Azerbaijani
literature,” because “the great epic poet Nezami Ganjavi and no less gifted,
beloved people’s poet of Azerbaijan, Khaqani, lived” at this age.[26]This assessment was received in the Republic
as a canonizing assessment, and in that very year one could read about the
“epoch of Nezami, which has come into history as the “Golden Age of the
Azerbaijani culture.”[27]“This is how the Secretary of the CC of the
Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Comrade M.D. Baqerov defined it,” was reported
to the so-called “wide reader” of the USSR.[28]And for him, it was certainly authoritative.

Both the political
circles, as well as the scholars of Azerbaijan were fully aware that the best
results in the works on the legacy of Nezami – a work that by its nature
related to the classical Oriental philology – could be achieved only through
cooperation with the specialists from the Oriental centers of Russia, primarily
Leningrad.The Republic acknowledged
that the “Institute of History, Language, and Literature is still the most weak
part of the AzBAS [Azerbaijani Branch of the Academy of Sciences ].”[29]At the same time, in Russian Orientalism
there already appeared a good tradition, even school of helping the peoples of
the USSR in their national and cultural building.The press had a report: “The leaders of the
organization of Azerbaijan are attracting to the preparation of the Anniversary
(Nezami – A.T.) the Institute of Oriental Studies of the AS of the USSR,
scholars, artists, and poets.”[30]

E.E. Bertels took the
most active part in this process, and it is an interesting, mostly a model
fragment of the history of the Soviet Orientalism.The political situations played an important
role in the biography of E.E. Bertels.Maybe the most difficult ones and the most unique were connected to his
works on Nezami.

There were
achievements in 1938, but the Anniversary Campaign for the 800th
Anniversary of Nezami as a whole was not going as dynamically, as its
initiators wanted, and required constant control and stimulation.This is not strange either.With all due respect and interest towards
Nezami, the problem of his anniversary in the period of 1938-1941 objectively
could not be considered as a primary problem.Moreover, on February 3, 1939, Pravda published an article by
E.E. Bertels, “Genius Azerbaijani Poet, Nezami.”[31]Getting published by own initiative in Pravda,
especially not long before the XVIII Convention of the ACP(b) was obviously
very difficult.Therefore, it can be
assumed that the article was ordered.This was E.E. Bertels’ first public statement to the whole country,
where he called Nezami an Azerbaijani poet.Almost ten years later, Bertels stated: “To ascertain ethnic
belongingness of every author worthy of attention, and then reclassify them by
different literatures; well such a task, firstly, would be impossible to
implement, because we do not have the data on the ethnic belongingness of old
writers, and will likely never have them.Secondly, methodologically it would have been faulty to the most
extreme.Consequently, we would be building
literature based on blood, based on race.We do not need to mention that we cannot and will not build literature
in such a fashion; I in any case will not; if somebody else wants to, please,
it is his personal business.”[32]However, in his 1939 article, Bertels did not
bring any proof that Nezami is an Azerbaijani poet, other than the fact that
the Poet was born and lived in Ganja (future Kirovabad).This is one of the riddles of the Scholar:
he, for some reasons, decided to recede from his original scholarly views in
the 1930s, or they changed at the end of the 1940s?

E.E. Bertels’ article
in Pravda surely was an important stage in the formation of the Soviet
Nezami studies.Academician and
literalist, I.K. Luppov said: “If half a year ago, a “cellar” on Nezami was
found in Pravda, if in the Soviet Union, an organ of the Party put a
“cellar” on Nezami, it means that every conscious inhabitant of the Soviet
Union must know who Nezami is.It is an
indication to all the directorate organizations, to all the instances of the
Republican, County, District scale, and here the Academy of Sciences must say
its word in this work, while not violating its high scholarly dignity.”[33]

However,
the view on Nezami in the publications of Pravda, could be reviewed, and
accepted as wrong.Many people who were
declared “enemies of the people” were published in different times in Pravda
and many wrong viewpoints had appeared in its pages.A good chance interfered into the situation,
possibly a very well organized one.

On
April 3, 1939, Pravda published the material “On the Results of the
XVIII Convention of the ACP(b).The
speech by Comrade M. Bazhan in the meeting of the intelligentsia of Kiev on
April 2, 1939.”The Ukrainian poet,
Mikol Bazhan informed about the meeting between J.V. Stalin with writers,
Alexander Fadeev and Peter Pavlenko.“Comrade Stalin especially attentively asked, was interested, and even
checked the knowledge of these Comrades about the phenomena and names of the
Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kalmyk, Lak people’s literature, whose literature unfortunately,
even today is not fully known to the Soviet reader.Comrade Stalin spoke of the Azerbaijani poet,
Nezami, quoted his works to destroy the viewpoint by his own words that this
great poet of our brotherly Azerbaijani people, should be given to the Iranian
literature, just because he has written most of his works in the Iranian
language.Nezami, in his poems himself
asserts that he was compelled to resort to the Iranian language, because he is
not allowed to address his own people in his native tongue.This very place did Comrade Stalin quote with
the genius swing of his thought and erudition, while including everything
remarkable that has been created by the history of mankind.”[34]

Although
Stalin’s viewpoint was promulgated literally through the third person,
certainly it was told correctly, and the conversation with Stalin in fact did
take place.Nobody would even think of
coming up with something from Stalin’s mouth.After M. Bazhan’s speech was published, E.E. Bertels’ article on Nezami
became of secondary importance.A
logical question arises: why did Stalin remember of Nezami, especially during
the political situation of 1939?It must
be taken into account that Stalin loved poetry and understood it, and he loved
Baku.However, even without these
factors, he perfectly understood the political meaning of the anniversary of
Nezami – the Azerbaijani poet.

Bazhan’s
report was met with enthusiasm in Baku.On April 10, 1939, the Meeting of the Intelligentsia of the city adopted
the poem for J.V. Stalin.The authors of
the poem were Samed Vurgun, Rasul Reza, and Soleiman Rostam, while the
translators to Russian were P. Panchenko, I. Oratovskiy, and V. Gurvich.On April 16, 1939, this message was published
in Pravda.It has the following
lines:

|But| [the] the words sung by [the] singer|
in hearts| grateful| are strong|

|You| to us| returned his poems, his
greatness [you] returned

|With immortal word| you about him| the
pages of the world| [you] brightened

On the next day, “The Baku Worker”
republished the Russian version referring to Pravda.But interestingly the Azerbaijani original
was not published until April 17, 1939.[36]

The official Baku underlined that
all the events on Nezami’s anniversary which have a political aspect are done
through the initiative of Moscow, and by Moscow’s approval.

The new interest, which was shown by
Stalin on Nezami, gave a new impulse for the further development of the
anniversary campaign.In Azerbaijan,
Committee for Preparation and Carrying-out of the 800th Birth
Anniversary of Nezami Ganjavi under the Council of the People’s Commissars
(CPS) of the AzSSR, which started its work in May of 1939.Its membership included all three authors of
the Address to Stalin, as well as E.E. Bertels, I.A. Orbeli, Merza Ebrahimov,
M.D. Baqerov, who was formally an ordinary member of the Anniversary Committee
and others.[37]However, the activities of the Committee were
naturally under the control of Baqerov.

After the viewpoint of Stalin on the
issue of Nezami was published, the affair of publishing the “Anthology of the
Azerbaijani Poetry” in Moscow made a progress, and hardly is it an
accident.In the autumn of 1939, it came
out in 15,000 copies.Poetess A. Adalis,
wrote a very benevolent review, which has nonetheless strange and difficult to
explain positions.The review say that
such an anthology is coming out for the “first time in the history of world
literature,” and “a clear word is said about the belongingness to the
Azerbaijani people of a number of world classics in this book.”[38]The full impression that Adalis did not know
anything about the Anthology, published in 1938 in Baku, in which, by the way,
a fragment from “Kor-oglu” epoch, translated by her took place.

In the foreword of the Moscow
Anthology, and the assertion that Nezami Ganjavi is the great Azerbaijani
poet-romantic, leans on a selection of arguments.There is a reference on Yu.N. Marr’s saying,
who is referred to as the best Soviet Iranologist, an excellent expert on
Nezami and Khaqani, and a reference to Institute of Oriental Studies of the
Academy of Sciences of the USSR “in its special decision on the anniversary of
Nezami firmly and decisively accepted in Nezami a great Azerbaijani poet.”[39]Here the Azerbaijani authors pretended that
everything that is happening around Nezami has been started by the initiative
and scholarly viewpoints from Russia.However, local proofs of belongingness of Nezami’s works to the
Azerbaijani literature were promoted.“Lively pages of history appear in the works of Nezami.Fantasy, fabulous imagination interweave with
the true pictures of life of the Azerbaijani people.The attack of the Rus’ to Barda, a fable
story about a Russian Tsarevna (Princess), beauty Shirin and Tsaritsa (Queen)
Shamira, the Amazons, battles described in different poems of Nezami – all of
this is historically and geographically connected with Azerbaijan and the
Caucasian middle age world.

“Is it necessary after this to proof
after this the right of the Azerbaijani people to consider the works of Nezami
as its own!Inability and reactionary
works of traditional attachment of Nezami to the Iranian literature by the
Bourgeoisie Orientalists is evident.Artificial, forced distortion of the history of world poetry, not
understanding the role of the Farsi language and the Iranian tradition in the
history of the Azerbaijani culture, denial of centuries-long history, of high
and rich culture and the literature of the Azerbaijani people by the
Bourgeoisie Orientalism; all of this brings to the denial of the large
historical truth, and strong creative powers of the people.”[40]The supporters of the new viewpoint on Nezami
saw political enemies in their opponents, and were not going to be sentimental
with them.

Baku also declared that the
Azerbaijani people “honors the memory of its great poet for 800 years,”[41]
and the clear insufficient level of knowledge of Nezami’s works was explained
in the following manner: “Base agents of fascism, Bourgeoisie nationalists,
super power chauvinists did everything possible to hide from the Azerbaijani
people the heritage of its great son – Poet Nezami.”[42]Such formulations also clearly did not allow
the wish to discuss – whose poet is Nezami.

M.D. Baqerov in every possible way
propagated the version that the return of Nezami and his works to Azerbaijan is
namely due to Stalin.In December of
1939, in the meeting of the Party activists of the city of Baku, dedicated to
the 60th birthday of J.V. Stalin, Baqerov made a speech, where he
quoted Mikola Bazhan, and added: “This saying of Stalin, which is full of
wisdom, teaches us how our relation should be to our past cultural heritage.”[43]

In 1939, a volume of BSE came out
where E.E. Bertels in his article on Nezami refers to him as a great
Azerbaijani poet.[44]This in a way formalized the review process
by our Orientalists of the national belongingness of Nezami Ganjavi.

Undoubtedly, Bertels
was well aware of Mikol Bazhan’s speech and the details of the future
scholarly-political campaign, and at the time he did not see a principal fault
in some politicization of some works on eastern literature.

We will bring, out of
necessity, a quote from currently forgotten article by E.E. Bertels, which
talks about the hero of Nezami’s “Eskandarnameh”:

The wise man travelled
for a long time.He was in the south, in
the west, and the east, but could not find happiness anywhere.Finally, his travels brought him to the
north.If we tried to draw his travels
on a map, then this place would be approximately in Siberia.And there Eskandar finally found what he was
looking for.He met people who did not
know rich or poor; who did not know depression or oppression; who did not know
kings or tyrants.In this open society
where powers are not spent on struggle, everything is directed towards
improvement and fixing of life.

There people were able
to get rid of illnesses, and prolong the happy life of people.Everything flowers there; everything makes
the eye happy; this is the reign of everlasting peace and everlasting
happiness.After he fond this amazing
country, Eskandar exclaims that if he knew about its existence earlier, he
would not waste time on his travels, and would make its lifestyle a law.

Perhaps to the
bourgeoisie researchers this country seemed a “scholastic imagination.”We, Soviet readers of Nezami, look at this
from a completely different viewpoint.We know this country; we are lucky to live in this country and know
which way one should go in order to achieve such happiness.

It also excites the
Soviet reader that the greater Azerbaijani thinker of the 12th
century, put this country in the geographic location, where his great dream was
in fact realized.Let us note that all
of Nezami’s works end here; that all of his works were to get to this
culminating period … And now, in the country where socialism became victorious,
a country that does not know the fear of historical truth, Soviet scholars take
onto themselves an honorable task to give to the peoples of their country the
treasures that were denied to them for centuries.[45]

What would a word of thanks to
Stalin for his help to scholarship mean as oppose to the abovementioned words
of political loyalty?!Bertels,
according to a number of his publications, was very respectful of J.V. Stalin,
however, in any of his Russian-language works of this era on Nezami, does he
mention that the poet has been returned to Azerbaijan by Stalin, and hence
there are no words of thanks to Stalin.It is possible that this has been mentioned in any of Bertels’ small
newspaper notes, probably in the Azeri language, however the possibility is
very slim.

Actually, in Moscow and in Leningrad
– the largest cultural and scholarly centers – as of 1939, there is a widely
accepted practice: not to mention the role of Stalin in the decision of
national belongingness of Nezami Ganjavi in the press.It is not evident whose initiative this was –
the government or the scholars and the literary circles.This, as a rule, was extended to the
Azerbaijani authors in the Russian publications.

The story that Stalin returned
Nezami to Azerbaijan is not mentioned in the Moscow edition of the “Anthology
of the Azerbaijani Poetry,” although the Decade of the Azerbaijani Arts of
April of 1938 is mentioned.In 1939, for
occasion of the 60th birth anniversary of Stalin, Samed Vurgun
published an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta (Lietrary Gazette),
named “Pride of People.”He has written
there that “Comrade Stalin loves the Azerbaijani popular proverbs and uses them
in an appropriate situation.Comrade
Stalin lived in Azerbaijan back in his young age.More than thirty years have passed since, but
he has not forgotten the Azerbaijani proverbs”[46]; but not a word about
Stalin returning the poetry and greatness of Nezami to Azerbaijan.

In 1940, there was the 20th
anniversary of the Soviet rule in Azerbaijan.In all the festivities a single message to J.V. Stalin was
accepted.In it Nezami was quoted; there
were words about the everyday patriotic Stalinist care, which has warmed the
Azerbaijani people; that Stalin is well aware of the history of this people;
but there was not a word about Stalin returning Nezami to it.[47]

15-20 May, 1940, Moscow held the
Decade of Azerbaijani Literature.One of
its participants has written about the trip to Moscow: “We are headed by the
greatest representative of the world literature, a genius poet of Azerbaijan,
the ever living Nezami … He threw the heavy chains of tyrants and oppressors,
from himself, who were forcing him to write in a strange language, and came
back to his beloved land.Nezami is
going to Moscow, he is going to thank Stalin, who returned him to his native
Azeerbaijani people.”[48]During the Decade, Samed Vurgun, made a
speech in the Lenin Military-Political Academy, and gave a new accent to the
theme of “repatriation” of Nezami.“Foul
enemies of the people, nationalists-Musavatists, Pan-Turks, and other traitors
wanted to take away Nezami from their own people, just because he wrote most of
his works in the Iranian language.But
the great genius of the workers, our father and leader, Comrade Stalin,
returned to the Azerbaijani people their greatest poet.”[49]Well, Stalin really did fight Pan-Turkism
very strongly.

In 1940, in Baku, the book of E.E.
Bertels, “The Great Azerbaijani Poet, Nezami: Epoch, Life, Works,” where Stalin
was not mentioned. Although the version
of Stalin’s great role in returning Nezami to Azerbaijani people, started to
dominate in Azerbaijan, none of Bertels’ works published there, Stalin was not
mentioned by editors; although they could, especially if Baqerov would demand.

In 1941, the book of Mikael Rafili
came out in Moscow, which practically had the same name, “Nizami Ganjavi:
Epoch, Life, and Works.”Its author, at
the end referred to Stalin’s saying about the poet as “the greatest stage in
the development of scholarship on Nezami.”[50]Hence it seems logical that the book opened
with the corresponding quote from M. Bazhan’s speech.

Was it an exchange of experiences or
correction of someone’s (E.E. Bertels’?) political mistake?The idea of opening the book with reference
to Stalin’s words might not have been Rafili’s.He was Responsible Secretary of the Anniversary Committee of Nezami
under the CPC (Council of People’s Commissars) of the Azerbaijani SSR, but in
his publications on Nezami, (primarily before the war) often did not mention
Stalin at all.

Under the accompaniment of the
politicized anniversary ballyhoo, the translating scholarly-research and
publishing work became more active, which was important both politically and
culturally.According to E.E. Bertels, already
by 1948, by the hard work of Soviet scholars, a new field in scholarship was
started – Nezamiology – whose works, written in the past decades “are much
better than what Western Europe could write in one and a half centuries.”[51]

The war did not stop the process of
creating the Soviet Nezamiology.In
autumn of 1941, the 800th anniversary of Nezami was even celebrated
in Leningrad.“On October 17,” retells
Piotrovskiy, “there was a meeting dedicated to Nezami in Hermitage, to which
many of its participants, including two of its speakers came straight from the
front.The bomb shelters of the
Hermitage were prepared in such a way that, in case of necessity, the meeting
could be continued there.”[52]The first speaker was the director of the
Hermitage, Academician J.A. Orbeli, “he delivered a fiery speech, which warmed
hearts.”[53]Then the gathered ones listened to the
speeches by A.N. Boldyrev, G.V. Ptitsyn, M.M. D’yakonov, and Poet V.A.
Rozhdenstvenskiy read out his translations of Nezami.[54]

In this way, Nezami’s anniversary
was held according to plan, and with most possible dignity.It was possible not to continue the 800th
anniversary campaign for the Poet after this.However, Baku disagreed.

In 1944, the abovementioned book of
M.D. Baqerov was published.Victory in
the war already near; and one could build definite plans for the peaceful
post-war life, and remember the Nezami celebrations that were cut off by war.

In May of 1945, Baku built the
Nezami Museum.“Just starting the
peaceful built-up, the workers of Azerbaijan honored the memory of their
immortal countryman.”[55]The visitors of the Museum in the Hall
“Nezami and Our Epoch” could see “The words of Comrade Stalin about Nezami as a
great Azerbaijani poet, who was compelled to resort to the Iranian language,
because he was not allowed to address his people in the native language, with
golden letters were placed on the wall”[56]Izvestiya reported on it, but the Baku Worker
for some reason did not pay attention to this.In 1946, Baku published Baqerov’s book in the second edition.Whatever the reasons, this was another
reminder about the Nezami problem; about the uncelebrated anniversary of the
Poet in the Republic.The question about
why this anniversary was not held in 1945, 1946, but only in 1947, is still not
answered.Nevertheless, E.E. Bertels,
most likely because of the circumstances, said that the date of birth of Nezami
“cannot be considered firmly fixed” and “there are basis to believe that he was
born a few years later, or in 1147.”[57]

Victory in the Great Patriotic War
strengthened the feeling of national identity and national pride of the peoples
of the USSR.In such a atmosphere, in
summer-autumn of 1947, a limited discussion on the circumstances of Nezami’s
life and works, and the level of cultural development during the
Shirvan-Shahs.Without getting to the
details of the discussion, that such an argument appeared: “The Azerbaijani
people – according to Comrade Skosyrev – were almost all illiterate, destitute,
and without rights.They were under the
foreign domination of Shirvan-Shahs, and their national culture was trampled
upon.The question arises that on what
basis were the works of Nezami born then?Is it possible that a people almost fully illiterate and destitute,
according to Comrade Skosyrev, could create Nezami?Why did Skosyrev need these black colors
towards the Azerbaijani literature of the 12th century?”[58]And this underlined that the Nezami
anniversary was needed for Azerbaijan as a political measure as well.

The life and the work of Evgeni
Eduardovich Bertels have not been studied, as yet, as fully as they deserve,
both by virtue of their own outstanding character, and as a reflection of the
peculiarities of the formation and the development of oriental studies in the
USSR. Therefore it is objectively necessary to enter any materials that tell us
something new about E. E. Bertels into scholarly circulation. This applies to
the text of B. N. Zakhoder's speech, published now, which is dominated by the
motif of the immense significance of Bertels's work in the development of
research in the area of oriental philology, and the scholar's contribution to
the cause of acquainting broad masses of readers with the literary
heritageof the East. But among those,
probably not numerous, readers who are well acquainted with the biography and
the creative output of E. E. Bertels, the first impression might be that they
are facing a text of rather ordinary anniversary celebration speech, for all
its vividness and elegance, a speech not violating the canons of its genre and,
moreover, containing little that is new. There would be grounds to be satisfied
with such an estimate. But feeling the atmosphere in which the speech was made,
getting a notion of the reasons why it became what it was, realizing what it
says about the relations between E. E. Bertels and B. N. Zakhoder, and what is
its significance for the characterization of them both – in short,
understanding this speech in full, is only possible by implementing the
recommendation – or the demand – of another well-known orientalist, E. M.
Zhukov: “We are obligated to translate everything, through to the end, into the
language of politics”. That was said precisely in connection with the
discussion of the works of E. E. Bertels, in the process of the
academic-political campaign of struggle against bourgeois cosmopolitanism in
Soviet oriental studies that developed in the late forties. That campaign was
conducted mainly “in the language of politics”, as also was (though to a lesser
degree) another campaign that took place simultaneously: for a Marxist
treatment of the history of literatures of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Both
campaigns have remained in the history of the nation's oriental studies as very
ambiguous phenomena. In their course, E. E. Bertels was subjected to harsh,
politicized criticism.

It is logical that the events of
both academic-political campaigns are only mentioned by B. N. Zakhoder in
passing, as intensive and fruitful discussions; nevertheless, they have largely
determined the content and the goals of his speech. Even though Zakhoder is
evidently well-informed, yet in many details he is imprecise, sometimes
deliberately so. He could not fail to know that the most criticized work of E.
E. Bertels was his recent, 1949, article, “Persian-language literature in the
Central Asia” 2. The author said in it: “By the Persian literature
we shall, from now on, understand all the literary works written in the
so-called 'neo-Persian' language, irrespective of their authors' ethnic
identity and of the geographical point where these works emerged.” 3
It was around this statement that the passions mainly flared.

It all began with the appearance of
A. A. Fadeev, the General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, on the
podium of the XII Plenum of the SSW (December 15-20, 1948). 4 The problems discussed at the plenum became
the topic of anarticle in “Culture and
Life” [“Kultura i zhizn”] , the newspaper of the Department of Agitation and
Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Its author, the
writer K. M. Simonov, asserted, following Fadeev: “Theories still have
circulation among our orientalists, according to which the history of the
literature of the peoples of Central Asia, beginning almost as far off as the
middle of the past century, should be considered as some unified history. These
scholars, under the guise of “historical objectivity”, turn over to Persians,
to Persian literature, a whole series of outstanding writers and major literary
phenomena, undoubtedly belonging to the history of the literatures of the
peoples of the Soviet Central Asian republics. This question was raised
especially sharply ... in connection with the history of the Tajik literature.
These and a whole series of other errors, present in works of historians of
literature in the republics and of orientalists in Moscow and Leningrad require
analysis and severe criticism and correction.” 5 Both Fadeev and
Simonov were speaking about, among others, E. E. Bertels.

In the Moscow group of the Institute
of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (IOS AS), where Bertels was
working in the late 40s, a discussion took place, at an open Party meeting,
over a report by the Institute's deputy director A. K. Borovkov “For a
Marxist-Leninist history of the literatures of Central Asia and the Caucasus”
(the discussion was held on February 7, 10, and 24, 1949). On April 4-6, an
extended combined meeting was held of the academic council of the Pacific
Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and the Bureau of the Moscow Group
of IOS AS, discussing the report of the Pacific Institute director E. M.
Zhukov: “On the struggle against bourgeois cosmopolitanism in oriental
studies.” During both meetings, colleagues blamed E. E. Bertels for deviating
from Marxism, for reflecting in his works the objectivist errors and the
cosmopolitan views characteristic of bourgeois oriental studies. It would be a
stretch to assert that the criticism pursued the goal of “extirpating” Bertels
from oriental studies. But he, too, was the target of calls to expose to the
bottom and discard the “regional cosmopolitan theories of 'classical Persian
literature'” and to “smash to the end the miserable bunch of rootless
cosmopolitans, poisoning with their toxic breath the atmosphere of creative
surge in our country.”

In the discussion over Borovkov's
report, Bertels admitted: “I must say candidly that those papers which I wrote
on the issues of Persian literature, inno way I want to claim that this was remotely similar, not only to
Marxism, but even to anything approaching it.” 6 But at the same time he was in no hurry (and
that, too, was well known to B. N. Zakhoder) to agree unreservedly with the
criticism of his views. “To find out the ethnic identity of every author worth
notice, and then classify them over the various literatures – but such a task
would be, first of all, impossible to perform, because we have no data on the
ethnic identity of old writers, and, probably, we will never have them; and,
secondly, that would be methodologically vicious to the extreme. We would,
then, be constructing literature by blood, by race. It hardly needs saying that
we cannot and shall not be constructing literature in such a way, I won't, at
least – if someone else wants to do it, let him, that is his private affair”
Bertels said in the same statement, and he added: “How to draw the dividing
line between the Persian and the Tajik literatures, I, frankly, do not know. If
we take the position that a writer must necessarily be assigned to the place
where he was born and where he acted for the greatest part of his life, then
that principle will lead us nowhere.”

A. K. Borovkov called E. E. Bertels's
statement unsatisfactory and non-self-critical, because the latter “did not say
that the criticism of his views is just” and “repeated those usual assertions
that he had made even before.”8

In the same discussion, B. N.
Zakhoder, first making the reservation that he was not a specialist in literary
history, agreed with A. A. Fadeev that “cosmopolitanism has, undoubtedly,
influenced many theses of the Academy of Sciences corresponding member E. E.
Bertels” “as a result of the uncritical acceptance by him of the erroneous
theories of the pre-revolutionary literary historian A. N. Veselovski.”9 Besides that, Zakhoder did not criticize
Bertels, but also did not defend him, though in 1949 it would have been been
both timely and appropriate to give the characteristic of Bertels expressed by
him later, at the anniversary celebration: as a Soviet scholar “who has not
stopped in his development, did not ossify in the traditions imbibed before,
but kept growing and developing together with the growth and development of our
science.” Such behavior of B. N. Zakhoder is explainable, of course, not by his
cowardice etc. (in the same discussion he unreservedly defended the Academician
I. Yu. Krachkovski) but by his views concerning the issue, by his
social-political position. They predetermined the evaluation by B. N. Zakhoder
of the discussion and the criticism that was expressed in it.

With the further development of the
campaign of struggle against bourgeois cosmopolitanism in oriental studies (and
not only in them), E. M. Zhukov accused E. E. Bertels in his report: “By
spreading the legend about a unity of different peoples' literatures on the
sole ground that the writers and the poets of these peoples wrote in the same
literary language – though they expressed different thoughts, different views,
different feelings and traditions – by contributing to that legend, Evgeni
Eduardovich is obviously aiding the spread of the newest bourgeois-nationalist
conceptions about an imaginary superiority of Iran's culture to the cultures of
other countries adjacent to Iran, in particular when speaking about the Soviet
socialist republics of Central Asia andTranscaucasia.”10 The conversation in the language of
politics about the scholarly work of E. E. Bertels was heating up.

Bertels answered: “I must say that I
love the peoples of Central Asia dearly, and will never let anyone abuse them.
In Central Asia, they know that very well.” At the same time, he admitted, and
made an attempt to explain, his mistake. “This criticism is, for the most part,
fair. The article gave an occasion, and had to give an occasion, for seeing the
relation between literatures of Near and Middle East as different from what it
really is. [...] But it was already clear to me in 1938 that a wholesale
assigning to Iran of all the immense, colossal, Persian literature – that this
is not only wrong, but is a major mistake. So, one had to either look for a
solution to this problem, or to discard this term altogether. And the whole
issue is that I did not discard that old term, but tried to fill it with new
content. And that is where this collision occurred. I was departing from an
assumption that has been accepted in Tajikistan by public opinion through all
these years – namely the assumption of commonality of the Tajik heritage with
the Iranian – for the centuries X through XV.” 11

But these explanations were not,
apparently, accepted by many. Criticism directed at Bertels sounded also from
the side of Avdiev, the Egyptologist: “His main theoretical and even, partially,
political mistake is that he covered with one traditional and conventional term
'Persian literature' the literary output of different peoples of Western Asia,
including the great literary heritage of the Azerbaijan people and the peoples
of Central Asia, which have created through a number of centuries grandiose
monuments of their fully original cultural creativity.

Repeating in this way the statements
of bourgeois scholars, and by this artificially impoverishing the great
cultural heritage of the peoples of Soviet East, E. E. Bertels,
anti-historically, artificially and quite incorrectly, constructed an
ethnically abstract Oriental cosmos, devoid of substantial internal unity, in
which Persians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Tajiks and otherpeoples of Western Asia somehow merge. Such a
point of view and its promotion in academic literature undoubtedly contribute
to reactionary pan-Iranism, and do significant damage to, on one hand,
development of Soviet Oriental studies and, on the other hand, development of
national cultures of the peoples of the Soviet East.”12

Such a criticism required
adoption of radical measures, and the topic “History of the Persian
literature”, developed by E. E. Bertels, was excluded from the research plan of
IOS AS. He was instructed to concentrate, temporarily, on dictionary work.

In 1950, critical campaigns in
Soviet oriental studies continued. In the article by I. S. Braginsky “On the
wayside from urgent issues: on the collections 'Soviet Oriental Studies'
[Sovetskoe Vostokovedenie] V (1948) and VI (1949) ”the same work of E. E. Bertels was qualified
as fundamentally erroneous due to the author's underestimation of the creative
potential of the Tajik people. Braginsky drew a general conclusion that was
categorical and severe: “The editorial board cultivates a backward, apolitical,
and essentially unscientific, direction in oriental studies.”13

On November 2, 1950, I. S.
Braginsky's article was discussed in the Moscow group ofIOS AS. The main speaker, V. I. Avdiev,
repeated, in fact, word for word what he had said almost a year earlier about
E. E. Bertels and his works, including his aid to the reactionary pan-Iranism.

And again, B. N. Zakhoder did not
contradict Avdiev's point of view.

The editorial board of “Soviet Oriental
Studies” reacted to the criticism. The seventh issue of the collection,
scheduled to appear in 1950, was to open with the article of A. K. Borovkov,
“The current tasks of Soviet oriental studies”. It asserted that such an
understanding of the history of literatures' development as Bertels's
“inevitably leads to national nihilism, to denial of the richness of the
literary heritage of the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, to denial of
the originality of their artistic creativity.”14 The collection was
already set up, but 1950 was pregnant with new shocks and changes in Soviet
oriental studies. The discussion in “Pravda” on the linguistic issues erupted,
triggering the campaign against “Marrism” - and the leadership of IOS AS (its
director was Academician V. V. Struve) correctly realized that the beginning of
the new academic-political campaign, objectively more limited in scale, was in
essence also the beginning of the folding down of the preceding campaign. It
was decided not to publish Borovkov's article, replacing it with I. V. Stalin's
works on the issues of linguistics. In the end, the seventh issue of “Soviet
Oriental Studies” did not appear at all; but all the same the criticism of
Bertels and others in print did not cease with that. After the transfer of IOS
AS from Leningrad to Moscow (in August 1950) its new director S. P. Tolstov
published an article, “For progressive Soviet oriental studies”, now quite
forgotten even by historians of science, but at the time, of course, well-knownto all who worked at the Institute. This was
the third criticism of Bertels on the pages of “Culture and Life” in less than
two years (quite an “achievement” in its way), where an image was being formed
of him as a scholar who is not transforming his erroneous, and politically
harmful, views. And the estimates given in this paper's issues, irrespective of
the person of their author, were perceived by many as a reflection of the
opinion of the Party's leading organs.

Bertels anniversary celebrations
were held in a situation when the topic of his (true or imaginary) mistakes
that had been discussed for about two years, was not yet closed. In preparing
his speech Zakhoder had to take into account the consideration that, even
though new acute issues, which were also being discussed “in the language of
politics”, have significantly displaced the previous ones, there was no
occasion to completely discount the latter. Therefore Zakhoder did touch on the
issue of Bertels's mistakes, but, as was quite natural, softened and smoothed
it to the maximum. The mention of the anniversary hero's passion for
butterflies was an elegant and effective ploy: the butterfly wings might help
freshen a tense or too-official atmosphere, should it congeal at the meeting.

Zakhoder, naturally, remained a
non-specialist in the history of literature; and his speech was, in essence,
counteracting the residual influence of the critical campaigns, which had
subsided, but not died out. Whether Zakhoder expected his speech to have a
wider resonance, is unknown. It is also unknown whether he was following in
full the criticism of Bertels that was also sounding in the republics. But,
counter to many of the critics' assertions, Zakhoder says the direct opposite
about Bertels. The example with the evaluation of Bertels's work by Academician
Bartold may be a coincidence, but this coincidence is significant.

At the time when, in Uzbekistan, the
estimates of Alisher Navoi in the works of E. E. Bertels are being criticized,
Zakhoder is speaking of Bertels 's struggle for clearing the image of Navoi,
etc.

In 1949, an accusation was voiced
against E. E. Bertels that some of his theoretical constructs and conclusions
lead “first of all, to the tearing away the peoples of the East from Russia, to
introducing hostility between the Russian people and oriental peoples.” 16
And Zakhoder emphasizes that the activity of Bertels as a translator has
“enriched our culture, contributed in every way to mutual cultural
understanding between the Russian people and the peoples of the East.” E. E.
Bertels is reproached for underestimating the originality of the Tajik
literature – and Zakhoder declares that “with great hope and interest, our
public is awaiting the appearance of the fundamental work, by the anniversary's
hero, on the history of the Tajik literature.”

Bertels is directly listed among
those who “give away” writers representative of the peoples of the Soviet East,
to Persia, to Iran; Zakhoder specifically underscores the anniversary hero's
merit in “repatriating” to Azerbaijan the poet Nizami Ganjavi. One could
probably find other, more striking, examples of the anniversary hero's powers
of observation – but Zakhoder preferred to recall the participation of Bertels
in the 800 years celebration of Nizami. It is easy to notice that the question
of Bertels's contribution to the study of Nizami is especially important for
Zakhoder. This is understandable: in this area, Bertels has the most
indisputable, under any circumstances, academic and political merits. The
article in “Pravda” where Nizami was called an Azerbaijani poet, and not a
Persian one, as he had been considered before, is among them. 17
Nizami is an Azerbaijani poet; this treatment of him will be now unchangeable
in Soviet oriental studies, independently of Bertels's will, but thanks to him,
whatever his subsequent mistakes. However, even here not everything was smooth
and unruffled. The Nizami studies, while one of the most successful and
fruitful directions of E. E. Bertels's research, were also the most politicized.

On April 3, 1939, “Pravda” published
the material: “On the results of the XVIII Congress of the VKP(b). Report of
Comrade M. Bazhan to the meeting of intelligentsia of the city of Kiev, April 2
1939.”
There, the Ukrainian poet Mikola Bazhan told about the meeting of I. V. Stalin
with the writers Konstantin Fedin and Pyotr Pavlenko. “Comrade Stalin spoke of
the Azerbaijani poet Nizami, quoted his work, to demolish, with the words of
the poet, the unfounded claim that this poet must, allegedly, be given to the
Iranian literature just because most of his poems he wrote in the Iranian
language. Nizami asserted himself in his poems that he is forced to have
recourse to the Iranian language because he is not permitted to address his
people in his native language. Comrade Stalin quoted just this piece, embracing
with a sweep of his genius all the outstanding achievements created by the
history of humanity”

On April 10, 1939, a meeting of Baku
intelligentsia voted a verse address to I. V. Stalin 18. It was
published by “Pravda” on April 16, 1939. It included the words: “The aliens had
held our Nizami, having appropriated the singer, /But the nests that the singer
has built in grateful hearts, are strong;/ You gave back his verse to us, you
have returned his greatness./ With an immortal word about him you have lighted
up the world's pages. By 1947, the point of view that it was Stalin who first
“returned” Nizami to Azerbaijan was dominant, at any rate, among Azerbaijani
scholars. The participants of the celebratory meeting in Baku honoring Nizami's
anniversary, adopted with great enthusiasm, as Bertels wrote, the text of
greetings to Stalin containing the same lines about Nizami. Thus, the priority
of Stalin in ascribing Nizami to the literature of Azerbaijan seemed to be
recognized by Bertels himself. And the criticism by himself of his own
mistakes, as it was done in 1949 after
the speech ofE. M. Zhukov, gave a
formal ground to reproach Bertels (as V. I. Avdiev in factdid) for an attempt to revise an already
established view of Nizami Ganjavi as an Azerbaijani poet, a view shared by I.
V. Stalin.

V.I. Avdiev also said this about
Bertels: “Having admitted that his theoretical mistakes are due to the heavy
burden of bourgeois science's old traditions, Bertels, undoubtedly, has made a
significant step forward which gives him an opportunity to start on the way
towards rectifying these mistakes, which is possible only by effectively
mastering the basics of dialectic and historical materialism.”20 In conditions
when any pronouncement by Stalin was declared by many to be a contribution of
genius, both into dialectical and historical materialism, it would have been
obviously profitable for E. E. Bertels's reputation to play in this respect on
the coincidence of his and Stalin's views on Nizami. But neither Bertels, nor
Zakhoder do this... As we see there are no mentions of Stalin in Zakhoder's
speech – on the contrary, he, quite rightly, emphasizes that Bertels called
Nizami an Azerbaijani poet before anyone else.

The speech of B. N. Zakhoder became
the basis of the first, in two years, positive publications about E. E.
Bertels, though in one of them it was said anyway that he, “having once
ascribed Nizami to the number of Persian poets, succeeded in overcoming this
mistake, which had been uncritically borrowed from bourgeois orientalism.” 21
Obviously, in publications, too, it would have been very profitable for Bertels
to refer to I. V. Stalin's point of view, but here, too, it was not done.

This is an additional proof that
those who did not want, to refer necessarily to Stalin, in or out of context,
in academic statements or publications, - did not do it.

The knowledge of all the above
allows to conjecture the reason why it was Zakhoder who became the main speaker
at E. E. Bertels's anniversary in December 1950. 22 After all,
something of the same kind could have been said by some of the anniversary
hero's colleagues – literary historians. Many could have found sincere, kind
words about him, could have recalled E. E. Bertels's services to knowledge. But
to Zakhoder it was also an opportunity to cancel, in some measure, his moral
debt, to say about Bertels what he had not said before, inconditions that were, of course, more
difficult. Such a version is not at all excluded – but if so, has Zakhoder
succeeded in compensating for what was omitted before?

21.Celebration of the
Corresponding Member of AS of the USSR Professor E. E. Bertels: in connection
with sixty years' birthday and thirty years of scholarly work in oriental
studies// Brief notices of IOS AS USSR, Issue 1, Moscow, 1951, p. 63.

22.On November 17,
1950, by the order # 95 at IOS AS, an anniversary commission has been formed in
the Institute, to celebrate sixty years of E. E. Bertels. The commission's
chairman was the institute's director S. P. Tolstov, among its members were I.
S. Braginsky, B. N. Zakhoder and others.

The introductory remarks at “the celebration meeting in
honor of E.E. Bertels were made byS.
P. Tolstov, the address of greetings from IOS AS USSR was read by V. I. Avdiev,
and today it may seem somewhat strange in the eyes of some people. E. E.
Bertels himself, to judge by some of his remarks, perceived objective
criticism, even if very harsh, as a necessary element of scholarly work. All
the same, it would be rash to assert anything about the influence of the
criticism on his relations with his colleagues in the period under
consideration.

Thus
we saw that during the USSR era, the heritage of Nezami Ganjavi became
politicized.He was attributed to a
non-existent identity (Azerbaijani-Turkic) during his own time and it was
falsely he claimed that he was forced to write in Persian.Even Stalingot involved and E.E. Bertels himself who said that it is impossible to
discuss the ethnicity of 12th centuries figure was politically
pressured and recognized Stalin’s decision.Indeed, later on when he wanted to express a differing opinion about the
integrity of Persian literature but again was forced to take back his opinion
due to political pressure.Overall, we
can see that attribution of Nezami Ganjavi as an “Azerbaijani” (which was
defined by the USSR as Medes, Caucasian Albanians or etc.) was political in
nature.However in order to justify this
political maneuver, some false arguments (like Nezami was forced to write in an
Iranian language) were coined. These
false arguments are dealt with in another section of this article.

After
the breakup of the USSR,
independent Muslim republics emerged and one of them was the Republic of Azerbaijan. Small
minority of the opposition and elite in that country (including the People’s
Front) strongly identified with pan-Turkism at one hand and also continued upon
the policy of weakening cultural ties with Iran by not mentioning or
minimizing their fraternal relationship with the wider Iranian world.

The
USSR historiography legacy
has been continued by some of the elite elements in the Republic
of Azerbaijan after the fall of the USSR.
According to Professor Bert G. Fragner:

“In the case of Azerbaijan, there is another
irrational assault on sober treatment of history to be witnessed: its
denomination. The borders of historical Azerbaijan
crossed the Araxes to the north only in the case of the territory of Nakhichevan
. Prior to 1918, even Lenkoran and Astara were perceived as belonging not to Azerbaijan proper but to Talysh, an area closely
linked to the Caspian territory
of Gilan. Since
antiquity, Azerbaijan has
been considered as the region centered around Tabriz,
Ardabil, Maragheh, Orumiyeh and Zanjan in today’s (and also in historical) Iran. The
homonym republic consists of a number of political areas traditionally called
Arran, Shirvan, Sheki, Ganjeh and so on. They never belonged to historical Azer­baijan,
which dates back to post-Achaemenid, Alexandrian ‘Media Atropatene’. Azerbaijan gained extreme importance under (and
after) the Mongol Ilkhanids of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when it
was regarded as the heartland of Iran.

..

Under Soviet auspices and in accordance with Soviet
nationalism, historical Azerbaijan
proper was reinterpreted as ‘Southern Azer­baijan’, with demands for liberation
and, eventually, for ‘re’-unification with Northern (Soviet) Azerbaijan a
breathtaking manipulation. No need to point to concrete Soviet political
activities in this direc­tion, as in 1945-46 etc. The really interesting point
is that in the independent former Soviet republics this typically Soviet
ideological pattern has long outlasted the Soviet Union.

“Finally, Azerbaijan
presents a somewhat more ambiguous picture. It boasts a well-established
official national identity associated with claims of a unique heritage based on
an improbable blend of Turkism, Zoroastrianism, moderate Islam, and its
historical function as ‘bridge’between Asia and Europe along the Silk Road. At
the same time there remain strong local allegiances and ethnic distinctions,
including submerged tensions between Azeris, Russians, and also Lezgins and
Talysh (besides Armenians), as well as stubborn religious cleavages (roughly
two thirds of the Islamic population is Shi’ite one third Sunni). This persistence of parochialism is
hardly surprising inasmuch as there has been little historical basis for
national identity formation among Azeri elites, who were significantly affected
by Russification and are still generally lukewarm in their expressions of
pan-Turkism. Perhaps
the most powerful source of social cohesion and stale legitimacy is the war in
Nagorno-Karabakh, which has at least generated some degree of collective
identity as victim of Armenian aggression perhaps a slender reed on which to
construct a national identity conducive to developmental state building in the
future”.

-
Начнем, по
порядку, с
Шахрияра. - For starters, on Shahriyar. Это,
безусловно,
азербайджанский
поэт. He is of
course, Azeri poet. Он
был
иранским
азербайджанцем
и писал на азербайджанском
языке. He
was an Iranian Azeri and wrote in the Azeri language. А вот с
Низами все
несколько
проблематичнее. But with aNizami several problems. К примеру,
на него
претендуют
и таджики,
которые
заявляют,
что он писал
на
таджикском
языке.
For example, he is claimed by different groups and Tajiks claim that he wrote
in the Tajik language.The same about
Iranians and Arabs.Monuments of
Nizami are not only in Azerbaijan but also in Iran, Tajikistan and the Arab
world. Да,
великий
поэт жил в
Гяндже. Yes, the great poet lived in Ganja. Но
достаточно
ли этого для
того, чтобы
весь мир
признал
Низами
азербайджанцем? But is this to the whole world recognized Nizami
Azerbaijanis? На
мой взгляд,
нет. In my opinion,
no.

- Это –
Хагани,
Вазех,
Ширази, Сабир. - It - Khagani, Vazeh, Shirazi, Sabir. С
признанием
их
азербайджанцами
у нас проблем
нет. With the
recognition of Azerbaijanis, we do not have problems. Но в то же
время мы
также
считаем
азербайджанцем
и Физули. But at the same time, we also believe in Fizuli. Но это
также
трудно
доказать. But it is also difficult to prove. Ведь, он жил
в Сирии,
никогда не
был в Азербайджане
и писал не на
азербайджанском,
а на арабском
языке.
After all, he lived in Syria, has never been in Azerbaijan, and also wrote Arabic.

Поймите,
я не говорю,
что Низами
или Физули не
являются
азербайджанцами,
но это еще нужно
доказать
всему миру. Understand, I am not saying that Nizami, Fizuli are not
tAzerbaijanis, but it remains to be proved to the world. А для этого
нам нужно для
этого,
прежде
всего,
построить
правильную
линию
пропаганды. And for that we need to do this, first of all, to build a
proper line of propaganda. Пока
она на очень
низком
уровне. While it is very low.

Thus
the above news reports from the Republic
of Azerbaijan
takes an issue with calling Nizami Ganjavi an Iranian.Indeed an ethnic Iranian Talysh editor who
believes that Nizami Ganjavi and Babak Khorramdin were Talysh (perhaps the
merit of the argument being that the old Azari language and Kurdish and Talysh
are all of the same root and at that time mutually intelligible NW Iranian
languages and the Pahlavi idioms as shown in Nozhat al-Majales are closely
related to Talysh language as well) is accused of a grave crime for disagreeing
about the background of Nizami Ganjavi (although the article does not make it
clear this was the reason or something else that the Talyshi editor was jailed,
nevertheless why should an arrest of a person have to do with Nizami Ganjavi
who lived 850+ years ago?). The whole situation is easily solvable if some
elites in the country also attest to their shared heritage with the wider
Iranian world.

Yet
all scholars agree that Nizami was at least half Iranic ethnically and he wrote
all his work in Persian.He also praised
his rulers as rulers of Persia/Iran which means that to him, the land he was
living in was the Persia/Iran.Furthermore,
as will be shown, there are clear arguments for 100% Iranian ethnicity and of
course explicit testaments to his Persian heritage.

Nizami
Ganjavi is known by his Persian epic poetry. The Iranian world and Persian
speaking world has many great poets and the current government of Iran is a
pan-Islamic government and in terms of nation building, it does not put a
serious endeavor like former USSR countries, many of whom have been besieged by
ethnic war and thus have a high nationalist fervor both amongst their
government elite and some of their people.

Thus
some elite sectors refuse to recognize that Nizami Ganjavi, who is part of the
Iranian civilization, is also part of the Azerbaijani’s heritage due to the
fact that they also have Iranian heritage. Instead, some still believe Nizami
Ganjavi was a Turk! who was forced to write in Persian or he used Persian
since it was a common tool.We will show
both ideas are false and actually not only Nizami wrote in Persian, but he
expanded upon Iranian folklore and mythology while nothing is said in his work
about Turkic folklore and mythology.His
stories were Persian/Iranian and not just the language he used.Thus besides ethnic reasons, the use of the
cultural language, Nizami Ganjavi was culturally Iranian as well due to the
stories he versified (and the ones he optionally chose like Haft Paykar
and Khusraw o Shirin is a testament to this).

A
more prudent approach which will not cause contradiction would be to simply
accept the obvious fact that Nizami is part of the Persian culture and historic
Iranian civilization, and the Republic of Azerbaijan is also one of the
inheritors (alongside with Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Iran) of this Persian
culture.However, nationalistic scholars
in the republic of Azerbaijan do their best to disassociate Nezami Ganjavi from
Iranian civilization and to attribute it to newly forged identity (Azerbaijani-Turkic)
which did not exist at that time and is mainly a product of USSR and
pan-Turkist theories.The current
Iranian government of course does not care too much about this issue since Iran
has many historical poets and of course it is a pan-Islamists government rather
than a nationalist one.There are
pan-Turkist publications in Iran
(like the Turkish-Persian journal Varliq) who also claim Avicenna and Biruni as
Turkic scholars. They also obviously claim Nizami Ganjavi (and we will respond
to their arguments in the section “Misinterpretations of verses by the USSR”).In our opinion, 1000 year from now, if
civilization survives, Nizami Ganjavi will still be known by his Persian poetry
and Iranian cultural heritage since that reflects the character and content of
his work.

Going
back to such nationalistic writers who disregard scholarly convention, the word
of Dr. Jafarov (in the above news reports) shows ultra-nationalistic fever is
very high with regards to Nizami Ganjavi. Note Dr. Jafarov’s unsound assertion:

“It is a fact Nizami Ganjavi praised Macedonian Alexander,
who raised [sic. he meant razed] Iran,
while other Persian poets showed Alexander as a bloodthirsty killer. If Nizami
Ganjavi had been a Persian poet, he would also have shown Alexander as a bloodthirsty
killer instead of praising him. It proves that Nizami is a genius Azerbaijani
poet. Nizami’s creative works are in the spirit of Azerbaijan-Turk”

What
Dr. Jafarov fails to mention is that Nizami Ganjavi says that Alexander
followed all of the traditions and customs of the Kiyani kings (Achaemenid
kings) with the exception of Zoroastrianism. Without the understanding Persian
language and its classical literature (Ferdowsi, Sanai, Qatran, ...) the
understanding of the works of Nizami Ganjavi is also impossible. Alexander the
Great was also identified with Dhul-Qarnain of the Qur’an and many Persian
poets have praised him. He is after all an Islamic figure and Nizami was also a
devout Muslim.

These
sorts of statements about Alexander are typical of many Persian poets.This does not make Sa’adi a Turk just for
saying something positive about Alexander.Neither Sa’adi praising the local Turkic ruler of the area makes him a
Turk.

And according to the Encyclopedia of
Islam (Iskandar-Nama):

In the Shahnama,
Firdawsi already makes Iskandaran
exemplary figure, whom the companionship of Aristotle helps to rise still
higher, by the path of wisdom and moderation, in the direction of abstinence
and contempt for this world. And Firdwasi laid stress on the defeat of
Dārā (the Darius of the Greeks) as something desired by “the rotation
of the Heavens”.

..

At the
time of Niẓami, however, Islam is from then onwards well established in
Iran, and it is the prophetic and ecumenical aspect of his destiny that the
poet makes evident in his hero. As a learned Iranian poet, Niẓami, who
demonstrates his eclecticism in the information he gives (he says, “I have
taken from everything just what suited me and I have borrowed from recent
histories, Christian, Pahlavi and Jewish ... and of them I have made a whole”),
locates the story of his hero principally in Iran.He makes him the image of the Iranian
“knight”, peace-loving and moderate, courteous and always ready for any noble
action. Like all Niẓami's heroes, he conquers the passions of the flesh,
and devotes his attention to his undertakings and his friendships. These
features appear in the account, which follows ancient tradition, of his conduct
towards the women of the family of Darius, in his brotherly attitude on the death
of that ruler, in his behaviour towards queen Nushaba (the Kaydaf of Firdawsi,
the Kandake of the pseudo-Callisthenes) whom he defends against the Russians.
(Abel, A.; Ed(s). "Iskandar Nama." Encyclopaedia of Islam.
Edited by: P. Bearman , Th. Bianquis , C.E. Bosworth , E. van Donzel and W.P.
Heinrichs. Brill, 2007. (2nd edition online version))

The
Encyclopedia Iranica also discusses the difference between Perso-Islamic and
Perso-Zoroastrian view on Alexander. Persian historians and poets (including Ferdowsi)
according to this Professor Hanaway present Alexander as a just king:

“Two aspects of the story are important in differentiating
the versions of the Alexander romance that descend from the Greek through the
Syriac from those influenced by Persian oral tradition. The first is the
genealogy of Alexander. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes tale, and the Syriac
version, Alexander is the son (by an illicit union) of the Egyptian Pharaoh
Nectanebos and Philip of Macedon’s wife Olympias.

In many of the Persian versions, including that of Ferdowsi,
Alexander is the son of Darab (Darius II?) and the daughter of Philip of
Macedon. The second aspect is the way in which Alexander himself is viewed in
the text. In the Persian versions of the story, Alexander is usually identified
with Dhu’l-Qarnayn, a prophet mentioned in the Koran 16:84 (see Watt). In the
early New Persian commentary on the Koran entitled Tarjoma-ye Tafsir-e
Tabari Dul-Qarnayn is mentioned twice in connection with the wall of Gog
and Magog (I, p. 196; IV, p. 918). Stories of Alexander/D¨u’l-Qarnayn appear in
popular lives of the saints, such as Abu Eshaaq Neyshaburi’Qesas al-Anbiyya
(pp. 321-33 and in a chapbook version, Kabul,
n. d., pp. 94-101).

Among the historians, Tabari (I, pp. 692-704; tr., IV, pp.
87-95) gives the fullest summary of the tale of Alexander, including the birth
story in which Alexander and Dara are half-brothers, the details of which
appear in various Persian versions. Neither the historians (Tabari, Masudi,
Dinavari, and Hamza Esáfahani) nor Ferdowsi develop the prophetic role of
Alexander which the connection with Du’l-Qarnayn suggests, presenting Alexander
as a conquering hero and a just king. Nezami Ganjavi develops the prophetic
side fully in what is the most extensive surviving version in New Persian”.

(Encyclopedia
Iranica, “Eskandar Nama”, William L. Hanaway)

We
note that in the Shahnameh, Alexander the Great even visits Mecca and in the Shahnameh, he is actually
half Iranian. Nizami Ganjavi praises Ferdowsi (who definitely was not a Turk
and according to many sources his Shahnameh had a certain anti-Turkish bias)
and the Shahnameh had an important role in the Eskandarnama (as well as Haft
Paykar and Khusraw o Shirin). Neither Sa’adi nor Ferdowsi were of Azerbaijan-Turk
background but they both have praised Alexander who was identified with the
Muslim Dhul-Qarnain. We also note that Nizami’s romantic poetry is based on
Persian folklore (Haft Paykar, Khusraw o Shirin) and have
absolutely nothing to do with Turkic folklore like Dede Qorqod. Finally in the
Eskandarnama, Alexander attacks Azarabadegaan (traditional Iranian Azerbaijan)
and puts out the fire temples. Yet some of the same elite who deny any Iranian
also claim Zoroastrianism is a Turkic religion and Zoroaster was a Turk.

As
per the nationalist writer Elchin Hassanov.He is incorrect about Nezami and Shirazi.By Shirazi, he could possibly mean Sa’adi of
Shiraz(who is popular in the country
Azerbaijan) but he is not Azerbaijani nor does anyone know him as Azerbaijani
nor has he written anything in Azerbaijani.Similarly Shahriyar is an Iranian Azeri poet.He was born of Iranian nationality and spoke
Azerbaijani as his native language.However, it should be mention that the pan-Turkic claim on Nezami
Ganjavi is a falsified allegation that his father was Turkic.While the arguments of pan-Turkists arguments
are analyzed in this article and are shown to lack any proof (and are
misinterpreted verses seen through highly ethno-nationalistic narrow prisms),
we should not that Shahriyar’s full name was Seyyed Muhammad Shahriyar.Thus if one goes by purely father line,
rather than cultural contribution, someone like Shahriyar would be an Arab
since his father line (a Seyyed) goes back to Prophet of Islam (PBUH).Thus if a poet is to be classified by their father
line (we will discuss Nezami’s later), then Shahriyar is an Arab poet.If they are supposed to be by their output,
then obviously Shahriyar who wrote 90% of his work in Persian, will be a
Persian poet.However, Shahriyar is
classified as an Iranian Azeri poet (which we believe is correct) because of
his culture milieu.He hailed from an
Iranian Azeri cultural background.However at the time of Nezami Ganjavi, the cultural milieu of Arran and
Sherwan was Persian as will be shown by works such as Nozhat al-Majales and
others.For example at least 24 Persian
poets have been mentioned in the Nozhat al-Majales which is from Nezami’s era
and all being from Ganja.

.

Also there was no Azerbaijani-Turkic language,
culture, identity at that time of Nezami.Also the comments about “manipulation” and using methods of “Armenians”
in order to prove to the world that Nezami was “Azeri” shows that the world
does not at this time buy such a claim.The
Azerbaijani republic ambassador also confirms this claim as he clearly states:
“Most of Europe considers Nezami a Persian poet”.In actuality, it is all European scholars
outside of USSR, since they recognize that one cannot misplace time and history
and assign non-existent identities during the time of Nezami to Nezami.

Of
course if Iran’s government does not do anything, and ordinary Iranians remain
aloof, and some scholars are paid (we bring such an example later), then
obviously falsehood will creep into mainstream Western scholarship.

Indeed
there was no ethnicity by the name Azerbaijani-Turkic at that time neither was
there an Azerbaijani-Turkic culture or language (it came about through
proto-Oghuz mixed with Persian and Arabic vocabulary at least a century after
Nezami.All of the work of Nezami is in
Persian, his cultural contribution is to the Persian language and his stories
are from Persian folklore and culture.As per his ethnicity, it is agreed that he was at least half Kurdish (an
Iranic people/group), and we shall show that the ethnicity of his father was
Iranian(which is somewhat irrelevant in the case of Nezami since he was raised
by his maternal uncle and he was orphaned early from his father), although this
issue by itself does not make difference on his cultural characterization as a
Persian poet.

Just
like Shahriyar or Nasimi’s father line (both Arabic Seyyed) does not change
their cultural characterization as“Iranian Azeri poet” and “Turkic poet” respectively.Although with regards to Nasimi, he also has
written in Arabic and Persian and thus one should classify him as a “Turkish,
Arabic and Persian poet” and we do not know his cultural milieu and native
language clearly.Similarly, the founder
of Safavid dynasty, Ismail I is hailed as an “Azerbaijani poet” because he has
written in Azerbaijani-Turkic (less of his Persian works has survived).However if one goes by father line, all major
modern Safavid scholars classify his ancestor as Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili
who was of Kurdish Shafi’i background.All
Safavid chronicles both before 1501 and after 1501 trace the Safavids lineage
to Firuz Shah Zarin Kolah and in the oldest extant genealogy, he is called
Firuz Shah Zarin Kolah Kurd of Sanjan and he is called Kurdish directly.

The
same issue holds with Pushkin who had Ethiopian father line, but no one
challenges his place in Russian literature.With regards to Nezami, he contributed to the Persian language and used
Persian cultural stories and thus is rightfully a Persian poet.A poet cannot be translated and thus the
masterpiece he has created makes it also belong to the particular language he
has used.However irrelevant the issue
of his father line may be, we shall also show that all indicators show Nezami’s
father line just like his mother line was Iranian.Thus the above news reports show that
politicization of Nezami Ganjavi and robbing him of his Persian cultural
heritage is actively being pursued for pan-Turanist/ethno-nationalistic reasons
and nation building.

A
more recent statement from the ministers of foreign affairs of Azerbaijan
has a more scientific tone:

a country which embraced Islam in its very early days and
which remarkably contributed to enriching the Islamic civilization through its
illustrious sons of eminent philosophers, scholars, thinkers, historians and
poets like Nizami and Khaquani, Bakhmanyar, Masud Ibn Namdar and many others.

We
note that Abul Hasan Bahmanyar the son of Marzaban was a Persian Zoroastrian
and a student of Avicenna. The name of his uncle, which he devoted one of his
works too is: Abu Mansur the son of Bahram the son Khurshid the son of Yazdyar
who was also a Zoroastrian. Masud ibn
Namdar, as Vladimir Minorsky has clearly stated, was a Kurd. Indeed Masud ibn
Namdar himself affirms he was a Kurd. The Persian poet Khaqani has a Christian
Iranian or Georgian or Greek mother and an Iranic father.His title was the “Persian Hassan”.Finally, Nizami is the case we study in
detail and it is shown that all evidences point to non-Turkic, Iranian father
as well as Kurdish mother. Culturally, all that is left from Nizami are his
work and he considers himself an inheritor/successor of Ferdowsi. Again it is
this author’s opinion that just like ancient Egyptians are connected to modern
Egyptians, some of the writers from the Republic of Azerbaijan do not need
Turkify Avesta, Zoroastrianism, Bahmanyar and Iranian cultural relics in order
to feel a connection with their past.The
Iranian ambassador mentioned in the news should also explain that Turkic
speaking Azerbaijanis of Caucasus have Iranian heritage (despite massive
efforts by both USSR and pan-Turkists to deny and erase this heritage) and while
the language of the area has changed, Nezami is part of the Iranian culture
heritage of the region and they should also see this heritage as their own as
well and not try to retroactively and anachronistically Turkify it.

“The author of the collection of
documents relating to Arran Mas’ud b. Namdar (c. 1100) claims Kurdish
nationality. The mother of the poet Nizami of Ganja was Kurdish (see
autobiographical digression in the introduction of Layli wa Majnun). In the 16th
century there was a group of 24 septs of Kurds in Qarabagh, see Sharaf-nama, I,
323. Even now the Kurds of the USSR
are chiefly grouped south of Ganja. Many place-names composed with Kurd are
found on both banks of the Kur”

Whether Nizami was born in Qom or in Ganja is not quite clear. The verse
(quoted on p. 14): “I am lost as a pearl in the sea
of Ganja, yet I am from the Qohestan
of the city of Qom “, does not expressly mean
that he was born in Qom.
On the other hand, Nizami’s mother
was of Kurdish origin, and this might point to Ganja where the Kurdish dynasty
of Shaddad ruled down to AH. 468; even now Kurds are found to the south of
Ganja.

Professor Julia Scott Meysami also states the
same:

“His
father, who had migrated to Ganja from Qom in
north central Iran,
may have been a civil servant; his mother was a daughter of a Kurdish
chieftain; having lost both parents early in his life, Nizâmî was brought
up by an uncle. He was married three times, and in his poems laments the death
of each of his wives, as well as proffering advice to his son Muhammad.”

We
will discuss the Qom
theory and his forefather in a later section. For now, this section is
concerned with Nizami’s mother.

Jan Rypka (Rypka, Jan. ‘Poets and Prose
Writers of the Late Saljuq and Mongol Periods’, in The Cambridge History of
Iran, Volume 5, The Saljuq and Mongol Periods, ed., Published
January 1968. pg 578):

“As the scene of the greatest flowering of the panegyrical
qasida, southern Caucasia occupies a prominent
place in New Persian literary history. Hakim Jamal al-din Abu Muhammad Ilyas b.
Yusuf b. Zaki b. Mu’ayyad Nizami a native of Ganja in Azarbaijan, is an
unrivalled master of thoughts and words, a poet whose freshness and vigour all
the succeeding centuries have been unable to dull. Little is known of his life,
the only source being his own works, which in many cases provided no reliable
information. We can only deduce that he was born between 535 and 540 (1140-46)
and that his background was urban. Modern Azarbaijan is exceedingly proud of
its world famous son and insists that he was not just a native of the region,
but that he came from its own Turkic stock. At all events his mother was of
Iranian origin, the poet himself calling her Ra’isa and describing her as
Kurdish.”

The
late Professor Rypka does not get himself involved in the petty argument about
the ethnicity of Nizami. He just mentions what is a well known fact that the
poet’s mother was of Kurdish background and of Iranian origin. Professor Rypka
also uses the term “Modern Azerbaijan” which is a reference to the surge of
popularity of Nizami in the Azerbaijan SSR during the Nezami celebration of the
USSR.
Another point made by Jan Rypka is about the forefathers of Nizami. These are:
Nizami the son of Yusuf son of Zaki son of Mua’yyad.

From
the above data, we clearly state that the mother of Nizami was a Kurd. This is
shown in the following verses of his famous Layli o Majnoon where he
alludes to the deceased past ones of his family. He mentions his father Yusuf
the son of Zaki the son of Mua’yyad (some have read it as Yusuf the son of Zakkiyeh
Mua’yyad), he mentions his Kurdish mother and finally he mentions his maternal
uncle Khwaja Umar.

This
is given as:

گر
مادر من رئیسه
کرد

مادر
صفتانه پیش من
مرد

از
لابه‌گری کرا
کنم یاد

تا پیش
من آردش به
فریاد

غم
بیشتر از قیاس
خورداست

گردابه
فزون ز قد مرد
است

زان
بیشتر است کاس
این درد

کانرا
به هزار دم
توان خورد

با این
غم و درد بی‌کناره

داروی
فرامشیست
چاره

ساقی
پی بار گیم
ریش است

می ده
که ره رحیل
پیش است

آن می‌که
چو شور در
سرآرد

از پای
هزار سر برآرد

Furthermore,
scholars know his name as Ilyas due to this verse which is also connected with
his mother:

مادر که
سپند، یار
دادم

با درع
سپندیار زادم

در خط نظامی
ارنهی گام

بینی عدد
هزار و یک نام

و الیاس کالف
بری زنامش

هم «با»، نود و
نه است نامش

زین گونه
هزار و یک
حصارم

با صد کم یک
سلیح دارم

The first couplet clearly shows Nizami identifies
with Iranian legends and cultural themes. We will delve fully into this later
in this article. But, for example, the first two verses we translate as
follows:

My Mother who aided/protected me with Spand,

Gave birth to me with the armor of Spandyar

He means that his mother, who used to burn the
incense Spand for him, gave him birth with protected armor of the warrior
Spandyar due to this Spand and blessing,.

We note that one reason it is impossible to
translate and explain Nizami from Persian to any other language is the way he
has interwoven words and symbols of Iranian culture.It is very hard to translate the words Spand
and Spandyar.Also the translation will
not have the rhythmic nature of the verse.Finally words such as Spand and Spandyar are unfamiliar to those who are
not familiar with Iranian civilization.They can be translated to for example Western cultural languages by
transforming Spandyar to Achilles the Greek warrior.

It is worth explaining what Esfand and Esfandyar
are just to demonstrate this subtle but very important point.

Esfand is Persian word and it goes back to old
Iranian languages like Avesta. In Avesta, the word according to linguists means
Pure and Holy. In Iranic cultures, Esfand is a seed that was burned as incense
in order to keep the evil eye away. Usually mothers and grandmothers burn this
seed in order to cast away the evil eye which according to traditions occurs
due to envy and jealousy of others.This
writer himself recalls many times that his Grandmother has burned this incense
for this purpose. Esfand according to Professor Omidsalar was
well known among the ancient Indo-Iranians. Dioscorides provides in the 1st
century C.E. the earliest description of the plant; he further state:

“The practice of burning esfand seeds to avert the
evil eye is widely attested in early classical Persian literature (e.g.,
Lazard, Premiers poetes II, p. 12; Shahnama, ed. Khaleghi, I,
p.337; Farrokhi, p. 106). This practice may have been influenced by the
association of esfand with haoma (q.v.), the sacred beverage of
Zoroastrian lore (for argument in favor of such identification see Flattery and
Schwartz). The continuity of Persian tradition has brought the ancient sacred
plant into Islamic sources.”

Esfandyar is a popular hero in Iranian literature
and especially in the nationalistic Iranian/Persian epic of Shahnameh. Nizami
Ganjavi was well familiar with Ferdowsi and Shahnameh (including the 1000
verses of Daqiqi included by Ferdowsi) and has praised Ferdowsi and has used
the Shahnameh as one of his major sources. We shall write more about
Ferdowsi/Shahnameh and Nizami’s connection to it in a later section.

In the Shahnameh, we read about Esfandyar and his
battle against Turks (in the Shahnameh, the ancient Iranian tribes of
Tur/Turanians were taken in different places to be the same as Turks due to
similar geographical designations).Esfandyar
fights on the behalf of Iran
against the Turanian (also identified as Turks during the time of the
Shahnameh) Arjasp.

Here is one comment from Esfandyar from the story
of the Shahnameh:

بخندید
روشن‌دل
اسفندیار

بدو
گفت کایترکناسازگار

ببینی
تو فردا که با
نره‌شیر

چگونه
شوم من به
جنگش دلیر

Again we read from Esfandyar:

سرشاه ترکان
از آن دیدگاه

بینداخت
باید به پیش
سپاه

Again about Esfandyar after his battle with Turks:

ز ترکان
چینی فراوان
نماند

وگر ماند
کس نام ایشان
نخواند

Esfandyar is a major hero in the Shahnameh who
saves Iran from the invader Turks (although again it should be stressed that
the Turanians mentioned in the Avesta were not Turks but were identified as
Turks in the Shahnameh period due to similar geographical location and this is
discussed in Appendix C).Throughout the
Panj-Ganj of Nizami, we do not see one instance of heroes from Turkic (whether
Oghuz or Qipchaq or Uyghur) mythology. From the evidence so far, Nizami Ganjavi’s
praise of Esfandyar who has made some comments against Turks in the Shahnameh
is an indication that he was not Turkic or at least he was totally immersed in
Iranian culture such that he did not really recognize himself as a Turk.No one that knows the Shahnameh well and
considers himself a Turkic nationalist would be relating himself to
Esfandyar.We shall get back to this
issue when we discuss Nizami’s father and culture.

Nizami
writes about the passing away of his maternal uncle (khaal in Persian
means maternal uncle and is used in Kurdish and this is another hint at
Nezami’s background since he uses this family term with regards to his maternal
uncle) Khwaja Umar:

گر
خواجه عمر که
خال من بود

خالی
شدنش وبال من
بود

از تلخ
گواری نواله‌ام

درنای
گلو شکست ناله‌ام

می‌ترسم
از این کبود
زنجیر

کافغان
کنم او شود
گلوگیر

ساقی ز
خم شراب خانه

پیش
آرمیی چو نار
دانه

آن می
که محیط بخش
کشتست

همشیره
شیره بهشتست

It is well known fact that Nizami was orphaned at
an early age. According to Jerome Clinton and Kamran Talatoff:

“His
father, Yusuf and mother, Rai’sa, died while he was still relatively young, but
maternal uncle, Umar, assumed responsibility for him”.

Thus if the above assertion of the authors are
correct (Jan Rypka and Julia Meysami also states he was orphaned as an early
age and so do other biographers of Nizami), then Nizami Ganjavi was raised by
his Kurdish maternal uncle.The verse
about his father also points to the fact that he was orphaned early.Thus, even assuming the argument that his
father was not Kurdish, he did not know his father well and was raised by a
Kurdish maternal uncle.We shall show
later that it was the case that Iranians usually married Iranians (like most
people at that time), Shafi’ites usually married Shafi’ites (like most people
at that time) and thus it is hard to imagine that unless Nezami’s mother was a
servant (which she was not given the fact that the maternal uncle takes care of
Nezami and some have stated that Nezami’s mother was of an important Kurdish
clan due to the name Ra’isa being a title of a high women), his father would also
be Iranian.We will delve into the issue
of Nezami’s father later since Nezami does not explicitly pronounce the
background of his father as he does with his mother.

According
to Jan Rypka, the background of Nizami Ganjavi was Urban. This would make sense
given the fact that Nizami Ganjavi’s writing is a product of sedentary culture
rather than one of nomadic culture. We have little information on Nizami
Ganjavi’s father and all that is left is given in the following verses:

گر شد پدرم به
نسبت جد

یوسف پسر زکی
مؤید

As
Jan Rypka pointed out and most scholars concur with him, the father of Nizami
Ganjavi was named Yusuf. His grandfather is named Zaki and finally his great
grandfather is named Mu’ayyad.

This
is all the information that Nizami Ganjavi has left for us on his father.
Although it is not a whole lot of information, it can still provide us with a
few clues.

First
all the names are Arabic.This suggests
that Nizami Ganjavi’s father line was Muslim for at least three generations
before Nizami Ganjavi.The second
pointer is that there is no tribal designation in the name. That is when we
consider the names/designations of Seljuqs, Ghaznavids, Ghezelbash Safavid
tribes or even Turkic poets like Fizuli (reputedly from the Bayyat tribe for
example which was an Oghuz tribe although some authors have mentioned Kurdish
(see Kurds in Encyclopedia of Islam 2nd edition)), we see tribal
names from the father-side. This corroborates with the evidence that Nizami
Ganjavi was urban.Finally, since Nizami
Ganjavi was orphaned early and lost his father, we can perhaps surmise that his
father was at least 40 years old when Nizami Ganjavi was born. Thus we may
assume that 1140 A.D. (approximately when Nizami Ganjavi was born), 1100 A.D.
(when Yusuf was born), 1075 A.D. (when Zaki was born) and finally 1050 A.D.
(when Mu’ayyad) was born. Noting the fact that there is an absence of tribal
designation with regards to Nizami, we can perhaps assume that Nizami Ganjavi’s
father’s family went back to Ganja (assuming it was originally from Ganja which
again there is nothing to confirm this) to at least 1050 A.D. On the other
hand, some manuscripts of Iqbal Nama (although not all of them) claim that
Nizami Ganjavi’s family goes back to the village of Ta, near Tafresh in Qom in
Central Iran today.And other authors
have made such a claim based on other verses outside of that one.We will look at this point later. For now, we
can see that there is no evidence from the above verse that Nizami Ganjavi was
Turkic. Indeed the Urban setting, the Muslim names, the lack of tribal
designation points to non-nomadic cultures of Iranians before the Seljuq domination
of Ganja in 1075 A.D.Before the Seljuq
domination of Ganja, the area of Ganja was controlled by the Shaddadid Kurdish
dynasty and it was their capital. We will briefly go over this point later in
the article.

Either
way, Nizami Ganjavi has not left usexplicit statement about the ethnicity of his father as
he has done with his mother.The point
also is not important with regards to Nezami’s culture as he was raised by his
Kurdish mother’s family and all of his works are in Persian.But the evidence points overwhelmingly to
Iranic ethnicity and a clear Iranic culture as we will show later. Less likely,
but possible is another local Muslim group (possibly Christian converts
generations ago or even Arab migrants) origin who were Iranicized. Thus we will
have to look at other indirect evidence to see if we can find anything
conclusive about Nizami Ganjavi’s father’s background. This is the area where
many misinterpretations have taken place during the USSR era. The worst interpretation
which is often repeated is that Nizami wanted to write the Layli o Majnoon
in Turkish but was forced to write in Persian. This invalid claim will be
discussed in its own section.

We
note that some have even gone further and (as mentioned already) recently
falsified the verse in 1980 about his father:

پدر بر
پدر مر مرا
ترک بود
به فرزانگی هر
یکی گرگ بود

The
above verse, like much false information on Nizami Ganjavi, can be easily found
in different nationalist websites although it was falsified in 1980.Its basic rhyme of Gurg/Gorg (Wolf) and
Turk/Tork show its invalidity and the lack of knowledge of the nationalist
person who forged it.Some nationalist
groups have used this falsified verse in their article to claim that Nizami
Ganjavi was of Turkic stock. Supposedly the Grey Wolf or Wolf is seen as wise
creature in Turkic mythology. If that is the case, then one should look at
actual and authentic verses of Nizami Ganjavi about Wolves which gives a
totally opposite picture.

Here
are some verses about Wolves by Nizami Ganjavi which depict wolves as stupid,
vile character and bloodsucking creature! There is nothing about the wisdom
(Farzanegi) of the Wolf in his poems.The wolf is considered a vile, savage and stupid creature whose
stupidity makes him inferior to a fox.The wolf is also compared with evil people.For example:

Thus
it is extremely unfortunate that someone in 1980 falsified such a verse.
Unfortunately the above false verse as well as Turkish poems not belonging to
Nizami Ganjavi are attributed to Nizami on the Internet and many susceptible
readers will get false information if they use “Google” or other tools.

Northern Iranian peoples such as the Scythians, Sarmatians,
and Alans began to appear in the northern Caucasus
in the 1st millennium, B.C.E. The Persians and Medes who settled in Iran could have come in large numbers through
the Caucasus.But the first complete control of the Caucasus by an Iranic dynasty was that
of the Achaemenids (although it is possible that the Medes expanded towards
some portions of Caucasus but the evidence on
the Median Empire is usually slim).Caucasia was under the control of the Achaemenid dynasty
until the conquest of Alexander the Great.Afterwards, it came under the control of the Iranian Parthian
dynasty.The Parthian influence in Caucasus can be ascertained by the large number of Iranic
loan-words in classical Armenian (Grabar). Also the Parthian language is
considered by some linguists as a predecessor (or to have greatly influenced)
Baluchi, Kurdish, Zazaki and some other Iranic languages.

Perhaps the greatest pre-Islamic dynasty that had
tremendous influence in the area was the Sassanids. Indeed Nizami Ganjavi wrote
three of his five jewels about ancient Persia (the Eskandar-nama being
Persianized/Islamicized version of the story of Alexandar). But the two
Sassanid works of Nizami Ganjavi, the Haft Paykar and Khusraw o
Shirin are considered his most important masterpieces. Both of these works
have to do with Sassanid Kings. We shall see in the section on Qatran Tabrizi,
that the Sassanids were praised widely by local poets. Also as will be noted,
the Shirwanshah dynasty claimed descent from the Sassanids as did later Turkic
dynasties that conquered Persia
and became Persianate in culture and kingship.

Major cities and areas with Iranic names like Darband,
Ganja, Sharwan, Beylekan (Paydaaregaan), Piruzpad (Armenian Partaw probably
Islamicized to Barda’) testify to the Iranian influence of the area.During the Sassanid era, large number of
Iranians also settled in Caucasia and the Sassanids built walls and forts to
protect the Caucasus from northern invaders.

We will here quote several scholars with regards to the Sassanid era.

According
to Encyclopedia Iranica (Albania):

All along the Caspian coast the
Sasanians built powerful defense works, enclosing the space between the
mountain and the sea and designed essentially to bar the way to invaders from
the north. Firstly, north of the Apsheron peninsula, the two parallel walls of
Barmak rise up, 220 meters apart; these are known from the Armenian
Geography of Pseudo-Moses (ed. Patkanian, St. Petersburg, 1877, pp. 30-31)
by the name of Xorsbēm (cf. Trever, Ocherki, pp. 274ff.). Next are
the walls of Šervan (or Šabran), remarkable for their 30 km length

To the north of Samur a third line
of defense works could be the wall referred to as Afzūt-Kavad in the Armenian
Geography (p. 31) and thus have been built by Kavad (cf. Trever, Ocherki,
pp. 271-72). The most celebrated of these fortifications are those of Darband,
which shut off the pass of Čor (2-3 km between the mountain and the sea).

The contribution of the Sassanians
to the defense of this pass (mentioned in classical sources from the 1st
century A.D.) covered a considerable area. Movsēs Kałankatuacʿi
(History 2.11, tr. p. 83) speaks of “magnificent walls built at great
expense by the kings of Persia.”Yazdegerd
II undertook the construction of a mighty wall of unbaked brick mixed with
straw which extended from the sea to the slopes of Darband

A more detailed article on the influence of Parthians and
Sassanids is beyond the scope of this article. The reader is referred to Lang,
David M. (1983), “Iran, Armenia and Georgia”,
in Yarshater, Ehsan, Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3.1, London: Cambridge UP, pp. 505-537 for a short
survey.

Not only were Iranian settlements established during the
Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid era (and most of the Armenian dynasties had
Iranian ancestry), but in the words of Professor Lang, cultural influences of Iran
were also profound:

In other cultural spheres also,
there was much mutual enrichment arising from contacts between Iran and the
Caucasian nations during the Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian eras. One has only
to think of the perpetuation of the ancient Iranian gosdn or minstrel in
the Armenian gusans (Georgian, mgosani), who have continued to
delight popular audiences right up to modern times, composing both music and
poetic text as they went along. As early as the 5th century, the
Armenian Catholicos St John (Hovhannes) Mandakuni composed a treatise, “On the
Theatre and the Gusans”, a copy of which may be seen in the Matenadaran or
National Manuscript Library in Erevan.
Political re­lations between Iran
and her Caucasian neighbours may not always have been cordial, but there is no
doubt of the depth and extent of reciprocal influences in many spheres of art,
literature and religion, as well as in social and political organization.”

It should be noted that occasional Iranic and Altaic nomads
including the Khazars penetrated the Caucasus,
but this does not equate to settlement in the area by the nomads.Much like for example the Bulgars had
penetrated Thrace,Greece or etc.For
example the Viking Rus penetrated in Barda’and Shirwan around 1000 years ago,
but they did not have permanent settlements.

In this section we list some of the Iranian dynasties of the
era when Nizami’s great grandfather Mua’yyad lived. We also mention the
dynasties who patronized Khurasani (Dari-Persian) poetry including Shaddadids,
Rawwadids and Shirwanshahs. Iranian dynasties predominated in what is known as
the “Iranian Intermezzo”, a period after the Arab conquest which ended with
Seljuq conquest. The study of these Iranian and Iranicized dynasties is
important since they promoted Khurasani Persian (Dari-Persian) poets and were
patrons of Iranian culture.

Vladimir Minorsky in one of his seminal works “Studies of
Caucasian History” writes:

THE IRANIAN INTERMEZZO

It is still insufficiently realised that the so-called
Persian Renaissance in Khorasan had a momentous sequel in Central and Western
Persia and in Armenia.
By the beginning of the 10th century a great Iranian movement came from the
Caspian provinces. At the head of the hosts of Gilan and Daylam, a new set of
rulers ousted the Arabs from their last positions held in Iran, and round
this new power a fringe of other small principalities was created in the
farther west of the Iranian territories.

Even when the Arabs adopted the system of indirect control
of Armenia through the
agency of the Bagratid princes (A.D. 806-1045) to the east of this autonomous
area they retained the system of direct rule in Azarbayjan and Arran. To some extent this policy was dictated by the
great rebellion of Babak (201-23/816-37) in the eastern part of Azarbayjan.
Babak was captured and executed but there remained a number of important
problems, political, social and national, as between the Arab conquerors and
the local populations, such as the Armenians.

The grip of the Abbasids was gradually weakening as shown by
the centrifugal developments in the family of the last energetic rulers
appointed from Baghdad, the Sajids.1 Muhammad b. Devdad (276-88/889-91) and
especially Yusuf b. Devdad (appointed in 296/908) were powerful rulers and a
formidable check on Armenia. However, soon after 299/911 Yusuf showed signs of
disobedience. He revolted openly in 305/917. In June 919 he was captured by the
Caliphs troops and for three years remained in disgrace. He was re-instated in
310/923 but this time (down to 313/925) his attention was absorbed by affairs
in Central Persia (Rayy, Hamadan).
In 314/926-7 he received an assignment against the Qarmatians and on 7 December
927 lost his life fighting these dissenters. Practically the beginning of a new
era in Azarbayjan can be dated from Yusuf’s disgrace. The stage vacated by the
Arabs was occupied by local Iranian elements, the Daylamites and the Kurds.

The rise of the DAYLAMITE Highlanders, inhabitants of the
small and poor area above Gilan, reminds one of the expansion of the Northmen
in Europe. In point of fact the Daylamites had
an old dynasty of kings (“the family of JUSTAN”) who ruled on the Shahrud,
i.e., on the river which flows from the East and joins the Safid-rud near
Manjil. The MUSAFIRIDS, or Kangarids, whose centre was Tarom were linked by
marriage ties with the Justanids but were a family apart. It must not be
forgotten that the more important Daylamite princes, the BUYIDS were upstarts
who, with a crowd of other adventurers from Gilan and Daylam, appeared on the
stage towards 308/ 920.2 By 323/935 the sons of the Daylamite Buya were masters
of Isfahan and
Rayy. On 17 January 946 Baghdad
was theirs, and for a century the orthodox caliphs became puppets in the hands
of these heterodox usurpers.

The rise of the Buyids did not directly affect the
northwestern corner of Iran.
Apart from a few expeditions into eastern Azarbayjan, the Buyids did not
interfere with the affairs of this region. But the impulse given by them
resulted in the rise of a number of local Iranian dynasties, partly Daylamite
and partly Kurdish, both in Azarbayjan and in the adjoining regions of
Transcaucasia and Armenia.

Thanks to the publication of Miskawayh’s excellent Tajarib
al-Umam we now know much better the events in the lands between the
Buyids’territories and Armenia,
i.e., in the area under our consideration.

The original sedentary population of Azarbayjan consisted of
a mass of peasants and at the time of the Arab conquest was comprised under the
semi-contemptuous term of uluj (“non-Arabs”)—somewhat similar to the raya
(*ri’aya) of the Ottoman Empire. The only arms
of this peaceful rustic population were slings, see Tabari, III, 1379-89. They
spoke a number of dialects (Adhari, Talishi) of which even now there remain
some islets surviving amidst the Turkish speaking population.

It was this basic population on which Babak leaned in his
revolt against the caliphate. After the collapse of the Arabs and their Turkish
generals, the same population came under the sway of the warlike Iranian clans
and families. Despite their languages belonging to the common Iranian stock,
the new masters, DAYLAMITES and KURDS, differed among themselves to a
considerable extent. The Daylamites belonged to a particular blend of Caspian
tribes, spoke a Caspian dialect, were attached to the Shia, were recognisable
by their hirsute appearance and fought on foot, their arms being javelins
(zhupiri) and huge shields. The basic haunts of the Kurds lay to the south of Armenia. They
spoke a more isolated Iranian language, they professed the Sunna (or the
Kharijite doctrine) and they were horsemen. At a very early date the Kurds
penetrated into Western Azarbayjan and even crossed the Araxes
(see below, p. 123). There seems to have been a feeling that the Kurds, more
permanently established in Azarbayjan, protected it against the later invaders
from the Caspian provinces.

After the fall of the Sajids their former general DAYSAM ibn
IBRAHIM struggled for supremacy in Azarbayjan during some eighteen years
(327-45/938-56) with interruptions. He was a Kharijite born of an Arab father
and a Kurdish mother, and his fighting force consisted chiefly of Kurds.

Daysam’s first opponent was LASHKARI b. MARDI, a native of
Gilan supported by his countryman and former master, the Ziyarid Vushmagir
(“the Quail-catcher”). His conquest of Azarbayjan in 326/937 was a short-lived
episode (LA., VIII, 261). Much more important was the expansion of the
MUSAFIRIDS. As already mentioned, this Daylamite house, whose home was in
Tarom, south of Ardabil, was independent both of the Justanids and of the
Buyids; its main operational axis was in the northerly and westerly directions,
Under Marzuban b. Muhammad b. Musafir, surnamed Sallar (330-46/941-57) the Musafirids
expanded not only over the whole of Azarbayjan and up the Araxes valley, but
even into the eastern part of Transcaucasia (Arran, Sharvan) and up to the
Caucasian range. Both the Armenian royal houses, the Bagratids and the Artsruni
were their tributaries.

When after Marzuban’s death (346/957) quarrels arose among
his successors, the dominions of the Musafirids shrunk to the area near their
original home in Tarom, while new masters appeared in Western
Azarbayjan, namely the family of RAWWAD. Its eponym, Rawwad, was
an Arab of the Azd tribe first mentioned towards 200/815 as a semi-independent
ruler of Tabriz.
After nearly two centuries of new occupations and invasions, we hear again of
the masters of Tabriz
and Maragha bearing Iranian names (Vahsudan, Mamlan, Ahmadil) but considered as
descendants of a Rawwad. I have little doubt that these new rulers were scions
of the same old family although this time their family name, al-Rawwadi, is
sometimes followed by a further qualification al-Kurdi. Kasravi thought it
preferable to distinguish between the old Arab Rawwadi and the later Iranian
Rawwadi, and occasionally I make use of this suggestion. It would be only too
natural for the Arabs stranded in Azarbayjan to have intermarried with local
elements so that the term al-Rawwadi al-Azdi lost all practical meaning and had
to be replaced by al-Rawwddi al-Kurdi.

There are numerous examples of similar denationalisation
among the chiefs of Kurdish tribes. Between the two spells of Rawwadi
domination in Tabriz
lies a period (struggles with Babak, Sajid rule) when we hear nothing of the
family’s presence in that fief. Then suddenly in the list of Marzuban’s
tributaries (A.D. 955) we find an Abul-Hayja b. Rawwad as lord of Ahar and
Varzuqan. In this case “Rawwad”is not necessarily the father’s name, but more
probably only the designation of the family. The two points mentioned by I.
Hauqal lie north-east of Tabriz.
The identity of the earlier and later Rawwadis appears also from the fact that,
according to Ya’qubi’s History, p. 446-7, Yazid al-Muhallabi, the governor of
Azarbayjan on behalf of Abu-Jaafar (754-75) allotted to Rawwad b. al-Muthanna
al-Azdi a fief stretching from Tabriz down to al-Badhdh (later Babak’s
stronghold). The possessions of the later Rawwadis (Tabriz-Ahar) lay precisely
along this line.

Very unfortunately, the History of Azarbayjan, written by
one of the family, Abul-Hayja al-Rawwadi is now lost. It would have been useful
to fill the gap between 369/979, the year in which Miskawayh ends, and 420/1029,
when Ibn al-Athir takes up the thread of events in Azarbayjan.

While the Rawwadis were controlling Azarbayjan, another
Kurdish dynasty issued from a SHADDAD sprang up in the part of Marzuban’s
dominions which lay to the north of the Araxes.
We have spoken of the Shaddadids in great detail and at this place we need only
stress for memory the fact of their domination in Dvin and their close
association with the Ayyubids. We shall have further occasion to explain how
the roots of Saladin’s family go back to the Iranian intermezzo.

Similarly in another seminal work titled “A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th
Centuries”, Minorsky provides a description of the Iranian dynasties
that controlled the area of the Ganja before the Seljuqids. Furthermore,
Minorsky describes various Iranian tribes including Kurds and Daylamites who
controlled the region after the Arab conquest of the region.

The Albanians

Our oldest information on Eastern Transcaucasia is based on the reports of the
writers who accompanied Pompey on his expedition in 66 B.C. In Greek and Latin,
the alluvial plain of the lower Kur and Araxes extending between Iveria
(Georgia) and the Caspian sea was called Albania. The Armenian equivalent of
this name is Alvank* or Ran, in Syriac Arran (pseudo-Zacharia Rhetor, XII, ch.
7)—from which the Islamic sources derived their al-Ran, or Arran.

According to Strabo, XI, 4, I-8, the
soil of Albania
was fertile and produced every kind of fruit, but the Albanians were inclined
to the shepherd’s life and hunting. The inhabitants were unusually handsome and
tall, frank in their dealings and not mercenary. They could equip 60,000
infantrymen and 22,000 horsemen. The Albanians had twenty-six languages and
formed several federations under their kings but “now one king rules all the
tribes”. The western neighbours of the Albanians were the Iberians (Iberia being the ancient name of Georgia) and
the Armenians. Caspia (probably the region near Baylaqan) also belonged to Albania.

According to Ptolemy, V, 11, Albania comprised not only the above-mentioned
territories of Transcaucasia but extended
north-east to comprise the whole of the region now called Daghestan along the
Caspian coast.

One must bear in mind the
distinction between the areas occupied by the tribes of Albanian origin and the
territories actually controlled by the Albanian kings. The Armenians
considerably curtailed the Albanian territories to the south of the Kur and
Armenicised them. Only after the division of Armenia
between Greece and Persia in 387
did the provinces of Uti and Artsakh (lying south of the Kur) fall again to the
lot of the Albanian ruler. The earlier capital of Albania seems to have lain north of
this river, whereas the later capital Perozapat (Partav, Barda’a) was built by
the Albanian Vach’e only under the Sasanian king Peroz (457-84).

In the words of Marquart, Eranshahr,
117, Albania was essentially
a non-Aryan country (“eminent unarischesLand”). In the fifth
century A.D. one of the languages of Albania (that of the Gargars near Partav)
was reduced to writing by the Armenian clergy who had converted the Albanians
to Christianity in its Armenian form. According to Moses of Khoren, III, ch.
54, this Albanian language was “guttural, rude, barbaric and generally
uncouth”. The forgotten alphabet, the table of which was found by the Georgian
Prof. Shanidze in 1938, consisted of fifty-two characters reflecting the wealth
of Albanian phonetics. The Arab geographers of the tenth century still refer to
the “Raman”language as spoken in Barda’a. At present, the language of the Udi,
surviving in two villages of Shakki, is considered as the last offshoot of
Albanian. Living as they did on open plains, the Albanians were accessible to
the penetration of their neighbors and, at an early date, lived in a state of
dependence on the Persian Empire and the
Armenians. In 359 the Albanian king Urnayr took part in the siege of Amid by
the Sasanian Shapur II. In 461 the rebel king Vach’e lost his throne and the
country was apparently taken over by the direct Persian administration. Even
under the Sasanians Sharvan, Layzan and other principalities of the northern
bank of the Kur were completely separated from Arran.
Towards the end of the sixth century a new dynasty, issued from a Mihran sprang
up in Arran and was soon converted to
Christianity.

Though the names of the kings are
recorded in the local history of Moses Kalankatvats’i, III, ch. 19 and 22, the
facts about them are fragmentary and confused. We must await the publication of
the new translation by C. Dowsett. Albania
suffered particularly from the invasions from Northern
Caucasus, first of the “Huns”and then of the Khazars (see below p.
105).

Arran surrendered by capitulation to Salman b. Rabra al-Bahili in
the days of ‘Othman, see Baladhuri, 203, but the presence of the Arab amirs did
not do away with the feudal rights of the local princes. The fact that the
Mihranid Varaz-Trdat, who died in A.D. 705, paid yearly tribute simultaneously
to the Khazars, the Arabs and the Greeks (Moses Kal., III, ch. 12), shows how
uncertain the situation remained on the eve of the eighth century. The
authority of the “kings”of Arran was
restricted to local affairs and was mainly reduced to the southern bank of the
Kur. We know, for example, that when Sa’id b. Salim (*Salm) was appointed to Armenia by Harun al-Rashid (ci Ya’qubi, II,
518), the town of Shamakhiya
was founded by Shamakh b. Shuja whom Baladhuri, 210, calls “king (malik) of
Sharvan”. Consequently Sharvan on the northern bank remained outside the
administrative purview of Arran.

The revolt of Babak (210-22/816-37)
greatly disorganised the Arab administration, and, under the cover thereof, a
significant change took place in Arran. The
last Mihranid Varaz-Trdat II was murdered in A.D. 822. His title Eranshahik was
picked up by the prince of Shakki Sahl b. Sunbat. In 853 many Armenian and
Albanian princes were deported to Mesopotamia
and this secured a firmer basis for the domination of the new Islamic
dynasties. After the liquidation of the Sajids (circa 317/929) the system of
direct, appointments by the caliph collapsed and gave way to the hereditary
domination of Muslim houses: the (Hashimids of Darband, Musafirids of
Azarbayjan, Yazidids of Sharvan and Shaddadids of Ganja).

b. Iranian penetration

As we have seen, the original
population of Arran belonged to a special
group unrelated to any of its great neighbours. However, the Persians
penetrated into this region at a very early date in connection with the need to
defend the northern frontier of the Iranian empire. Possibly already under the
Achaemenids some measures were taken to protect the Caucasian passes against
the invaders, but the memory of the fortification of the most important of
them, Darband (in Armenian Ch’or, in Arabic al-Sul, but usually al-Bab) and of
a series of “gates’* (i.e. fortified passes), is traditionally connected with
the names of the Sasanian kings Kavat (in Arabic: Qubadh b. Firuz, A.D.
488-531) and his famous son Khusrau (Chosroes, Kisra) Anushirvan (A.D. 531-79).
A brief account of these works will be found on p. 86. Apart from such feats of
military engineering, the Sasanians strove to reinforce their northern frontier
by organising vassal principalities of local tribes and by settling in its
neighbourhood large numbers of their subjects, chiefly from the Caspian
provinces. The titles Tabarsaran-shah, Khursan-shah, Vardan-shah, “the Lord of
the Throne”(sarir), etc., found in Muslim historians (cf. Baladhuri, 207),
refer to the first class of indigenous vassals, though even in this case some
tribal names may have in view not the aboriginal inhabitants but the
aristocracy of outsiders superimposed upon them. It is curious that the
grandfather of Mardavij (the founder of the Ziyarid dynasty and a native of
Gilan) bore the name (title?) of Vardan-shah, which points to the existence of
a Vardan tribe or family.

The presence of Iranian settlers in Transcaucasia, and especially in the proximity of the
passes, must have played an important role in absorbing and pushing back the
aboriginal inhabitants. Such names as Sharvan, Layzan, Baylaqan, etc., suggest
that the Iranian immigration proceeded chiefly from Gilan and other regions on
the southern coast of the Caspian. In fact even in Roman times the presence of
Daylamite mercenaries is attested as far as Pegamum in Asia Minor, and in the
tenth century A.D. Daylam (i.e. the hilly part of Gilan, lacking fertility)
became the prodigious reservoir of man-power from which the greater part of
Persia and a considerable part of Mesopotamia, including Baghdad, were
conquered.

The most obvious of the Gilanian
names in the region interesting us is Layzan, now Lahlj, which is definitely
connected with the homonymous Lahijan in Gilan, see Hudud al’Alam, p. 407.1
Similarly Baylaqan (probably *Bel-akan) is to be linked up with Baylaman in
Gilan (Bel-man “home of the Bel-s”), see Muqaddasi, 372-3, etc. Sharvan itself
(“place of the Shar-s”, Gurji-van, Kurdi-van in the same neighbourhood) must
belong to the same series. Ibn Khurdadhbih, 118, and Ibn al-Faqih, 303, refer
to a town in the district of Ruyan (between Gilan and Tabaristan, see E.I)
called al-Shirriz, which may have been the metropolis of the contingent
transplanted to Sharvan. According to Tabari III, 1014, Lariz and Shirriz,
which his grandfather conquered, belonged to Daylam.

c. Christian elements and
influences

Of great importance in the life of
the area under our consideration were the Armenians who after 190 B.C.
incorporated the territory of Siunik’(also called Sisakan) 5 and other
districts in the highlands near Lake Sevan, and played a conspicuous part in
the affairs of the region lying between the Kur and the Araxes, and even north
of the Kur (in Shakki). After A.D. 387 these provinces were lost by the
Armenians, but we have seen that the conversion of the Albanians to
Christianity and the endowing of the Albanians with an alphabet were the work
of the Armenians. Armenian settlers and cultural elements contributed to the
further absorption of the Albanian nation. The Albanian and Armenian nobility freely
intermarried, with the result that there appeared a mixed class of
Albano-Armenian aristocracy. The later Armenian kingdoms of Ani and Vaspurakan
had little influence in Eastern Transcaucasia1 but the petty Armenian rulers of
Siunik* and Artsakh (south of Barda’a) played a considerable role in the
affairs of Albania.

The other Christian neighbours of Albania, the
Georgians, had to a large extent succeeded in preserving their statehood, but
their attempts at expansion were noticeable chiefly along the northerly line
Kakhetia-Shakki. This latter territory (Shakki), situated to the north of the
Kur, had a dynasty of its own, which in the ninth century played some role in
the affairs of Arran, see below, p. 83.

The Georgians professed Byzantine
Christianity and consequently were opposed to the Armeno-Albanian
Monophysitism. Attempts to introduce the Greek (Chalcedonian) creed in Albania met
with opposition. When the wife of Varaz-Trdat (d. in 715), with the help of the
bishop of Gardaman, took steps in that direction, the Monophysite clergy rose
against them and even invoked the help of the caliph *Abd al-Malik (d. in
86/705).2 On the other hand, politically the Greek Empire had much to attract
the Albanians, hard pressed as they were by their non-Christian neighbours.
Though at the time of the arrival of Emperor Heraclios in 624 the Albanian
prince did not join him, for fear of the Persians (cf. Moses Kalan., II, ch.
11), local historians on several occasions record - the close relations of the
Albanians with the Byzantine empire to which they even paid tribute.

d. Northern invaders

The question of the ancient
invasions into Eastern Transcaucasia from the
North cannot be adequately treated in this place. We know that the Alans and
other Caucasian highlanders were an essential part of the forces at the
disposal of the Armenian Arshakid Sanesan who carved out for himself a kingdom
north of the Kur in the neighbourhood of the Caspian (in the region later
called Masqat) and opposed his brother (or relative) King Khosrov II of Armenia
(316-25).

The most important invaders from the
northern Caucasus were the Khazars, a people
probably belonging to a particular group of Turks, and at all events including
a considerable number of other Turkish tribes. During Heraclius’s struggle with
Khusrau Parviz of Persia the
Khazars acted as the allies of the Byzantine emperor, and in 626 Heraclius met
Ziebel (Silzibul?), the nephew of the Khaqan, under the walls of the besieged Tiflis. The Byzantines did not expand their dominions in Transcaucasia which remained at the mercy of the Khazars
till the arrival of the Arabs. Baladhuri, 194, who confirms this situation,
speaks particularly of Qabala (east of Shakki) as belonging, or being occupied,
by the Khazars (wa hiya Khazar). Some peaceful Khazars were brought to Shamkur
in 240/854, see Baladhuri, 203. A party of Khazars was settled by Marwan b.
Muhammad between the Samur and Shabaran. The devastating Khazar inroads under
the caliphs Hisham {circa 112/730) and Harun al-Rashid in 183/799, see Tabari,
II/3, 1530 and III, 648, must have also increased the number of Khazars in Transcaucasia.

[We are far from having exhausted
the list of northern invasions in Transcaucasia
which must have left settlements in various parts of the country. In their rush
towards Armenia and Asia Minor the Cimmerians may have left traces of their
infiltrations. About the middle of the seventh century B.C. they were followed
by the Scythians (Saka), one of whose centres must have been the province
EaKaorpty) (Strabo, XI.8.4-5), irregularly called in Arranian Shaka-shen (the
first sh may have been influenced by the following -shen, or by the aberrant
Armenian pronunciation (Adonts). The most curious perhaps was the arrival in
the middle of the seventh century A.D. of a group of Hungarians who became
settled west of Ganja near Shamkhor (Shamkur), see below p. 164, n. 6.] [Note
Minorsky is talking about the Sabartians or Armenian Sawardiya].

e. The Arabs

The facts concerning the Muslim
occupation of Transcaucasia will be dealt with
in the commentary on our text and here we can add only a few general remarks.

Islamic geographers use the term
al-Ran (*Arran) somewhat conventionally. A
detailed definition of its territory is found in Muqaddasi, 374, who describes
it as an “island”between the Caspian Sea and the rivers Araxes and Kur, but
among its towns mentions both Tiflis and
al-Bab, as well as the towns of Sharvan. Ibn-Hauqal, 251, uses the term “the
two Arrans”apparently for the northern and the southern banks of the Kur. In
practice, during the period which specially interests us (circa A.D. 950-1050),
three main territories were clearly distinguished: Arran to the south of the
Kur, Sharvan to the north of this river, and al-Bab, i.e. the town of Darband and its dependencies.
On the lesser and intermediate areas see below PP. 77. 83.

Partav (of which Arabic Bardhaca,
later Barda’a and Barda* is only a popular etymology, “a pack-saddle of an
ass”) was occupied in the days of Othman by capitulation. Although the local
princes retained their lands, Bardafa, the capital of Arran,
became the spearhead and the centre of the Arab administration. Arab
geographers praise its site, its extensive gardens and its abundance of various
fruits.

Among the titles which the Sasanian
Ardashir conferred on local rulers Ibn Khurdadhbih, 17, quotes Shiriyan-shah or
Shiran-shah, which is probably a magnified honorific of the Sharvan-shah. The
ruler bearing this title submitted to Salman b. Rabi’a in the caliphate of
Othman, Baladhuri, 209. The building of the important centre Shamakhiya
(Shamakhi) is attributed by the same author to al-Shamakh b. Shuja* (see above
p. 13).

The earliest Muslim reference to a
native of al-Bab is found under the year 15/636: a certain dihqan of al-Bab
called Shahriyar, whose corpulence (“like a camel”) struck the imagination of
the Arabs, commanded a detachment of the Sasanian army and was killed in single
combat with an Arab at Kutha, near al-Mada’in, see Tabari I, 2421-2. When the
Arabs reached al-Bab (in the year. 22/643) its governor on behalf of Yazdajird
III was Shahr-Baraz - a relative of his famous namesake who conquered Jerusalem in 614 and for
a few months ascended the throne of the Chosroes. This governor submitted to
Suraqa b. ‘Amr.

After the conquest, al-Bab became
the base of Arab operations against their great north-eastern enemy, the
Khazars, who thwarted their plans of expansion into Eastern Europe.2 Many
famous Umayyad generals, such as Maslama b. Abd al-Malik and the future caliph
Marwan b. Muhammad, won their laurels on the Khazar front, and a considerable
number of Arab warriors and settlers were introduced into Eastern Transcaucasia
and especially into Darband, just as Khazar prisoners and settlers appeared in
Transcaucasia (see above p. 17).

With the advent of the Abbasids, the
grip of the caliphs on the Caucasian frontier gradually weakened and our source
dates the decay from the time of al-Mutawakkil (232-47/847-61). In 238/852 the
expedition of Bugha al-Kabir sent by the caliph liquidated the amir of Tiflis,
Ishaq b. Isma’il (of Umayyad parentage), who entertained close relations with
his non-Muslim neighbours and whose wife was a daughter of the ruler of
al-Sarir.2 After Ishaq’s death, Bugha attacked Ishaq’s allies (the Sanar
mountaineers) who inflicted a heavy defeat upon him. However, in the following
years (852-5) Bugha dealt severely with the Armenian and Albanian princes, many
of whom, with their families, were deported to Mesopotamia.
Though, on the whole, his campaigns were tactically successful, the local life
was thoroughly disorganised, and when the caliph’s attention was absorbed by
the war with the Byzantines, the central government’s hold on Transcaucasia
loosened. The foundation (or restoration) of Ganja by the Yazidid Muhammad, in
245/859, was the first symptom of the self-determination of a local governor. A
parallel development in al-Bab was the advent to power of the Hashimids in
255/869. Under the Sajids, and especially under Yusuf ibn Abil-Saj
(288-315/901-28), an attempt was made to resume the tradition of energetic
policy in Armenia and Transcaucasia, but with Yusuf s death the Yazidids and
the Hashimids restored their de facto independence.

In the beginning of the tenth
century the great movement of Iranian tribes (Daylamites and Kurds) withdrew
from the caliph’s control the whole of the western half of Iran. The
Daylamite Musafirids who seized Azarbayjan successfully extended their rule
into Transcaucasia up to al-Bab but only for a
short time. In 360/970 the Kurdish Shaddadids ousted the Musafirids from Arran,
and thus Eastern Transcaucasia became divided
into three autonomous Muslim principalities:

The Arab Hashimids (of the Sulaym
tribe) of al-Bab, who became strongly mixed with local Daghestanian influences
and interests;

The Arab Yazidids (of the Shayban
tribe) of Sharvan, who gradually became integrated in the local Iranian
tradition;

The Kurdish Shaddadids of Arran.

For this period of local awakening,
which forms a kind of interlude between the Arab dominion and the Turkish
conquest, our History of al-Bab is a source of outstanding importance.

The three dynasties of Shaddadids, Rawwadids and Shirwanshahs
deserve a closer examination. All three dynasties where either Iranian or
Iranicized and controlled the areas of Azerbaijan,
Ganja in Arran and Shirwan before the Seljuq
incursion and subsequent gradual Turkification of the region. The Shirwanshah
maintained control of Shirwan even after the Seljuq invasion. Sometimes, they
were vassal kingdoms and other times they ruled virtually as independent ruler.
The duration of this dynasty was the longest or one of the longest in the
Islamic World. Also assuming Nizami Ganjavi’s ancestors were from the region of
Ganja, then his ancestry through his great grandfather Mu’ayyad goes back to
this pre-Seljuqid era.

The Rawwadids who patronized Persian poets such as Qatran
Tabrizi were in the 10th century accounted as Kurdish. But in
reality, according to many experts (Minorsky, Bosworth), the family was
probably of Arabic origin, from the Yemeni tribe of Yazd, but became Iranicized
with such Kurdish names “Mamlan” and “Ahmadil” being characteristic Kurdish
versions of the familiar Arabic names “Muhammad” and “Ahmad”. The Rawwadids
rulers between a period of early fourth century to approximately 951-1071 A.D.
when the Seljuqs gained control of Azerbaijan. Their center was Tabriz and a good deal of
information about them is actually derived from the Diwan of the Persian poet
Qatran Tabrizi. Prior to their submission in 1054 to Seljuq rule, and the
subsequent Seljuq control of Azerbaijan in 1071, an important Oghuz Turkmen
incursion from the Ghaznavid realm occurred around 1020-1030. The details of
this incursion are given in Ibn Athir, the Diwan of Qatran Tabrizi and Ahmad
Kasravi’s “Shahryaran Gomnam”. Later in this article,. we shall look at
how Qatran Tabrizi viewed this event. But Wahsudan b. Mamlan with the help of
Kurdish neighbors and allies was successful in coping with this incursion and
were able to get rid of the chiefs of the Ghuzz tribes and driving off the
invaders from Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. So in short the Rawwadids lost
control of Azerbaijan
until Alp Arsalan returned from his Anatolian campaigns and deposed Mamlan II.
B. Wahsudan. But one later member of the family is known as Ahmadil of Maragha,
and his name was perpetuated in the twelfth by a line of his Turkish Ghulams
(servants), called after him the Ahmadilis (historians have called this dynasty
the Atabekan-e-Maragha (feudal-lords of Maragha)).

The Shaddadids were another Kurdish dynasty who ruled Arran
and eastern Armenia.
In particular, they ruled Ganja up to the year 1075 A.D. when the Seljuq
commander Sawtigin took control of the area. Qatran Tabrizi was also a court
poet of the Shaddadids and in particular has praised the ruler Ali Lashkari
among others. The Shaddadids submitted to the Seljuq Toghril Beg when he first
appeared in the Transcaucasia region, but in 1075 A.D., Alp Arsalan’s general
Sawtigin invaded Arran and forced Fadlun to
yield his ancestral territory (including Ganja). Ganja was the main capital of
Shaddadids and the Kurdish ancestry of Nizami Ganjavi might possibly be due to
the Kurdish settlements in and around Ganja. A line of Shaddadis did survive in
Ani, capital of the Armenian Bagratids and ruled from 1072 to 1174.

The Shirwanshahs were a dynasty of mixed Arab and Iranian
origin that were thoroughly Persian in culture and language at the time of
Nizami Ganjavi.They claimed Sassanid descendant
and are also called Kisranids (meaning related to Kisra=Sassanids).According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, the
title of Shirwanshah might well go back to Sassanid times. The father line of
these Shahs goes all the way back to Yazid b. Mazyad al-Shayabani, governor of Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Arran, Sharwan and Darband under the Abbasids.
Well before the 10th century, these Shahs were profoundly Iranicized
and in fact claimed descent from Bahram Gur. They are praised for their
Sassanid ancestry by Nizami Ganjavi and Khaqani Shirwani. Nizami Ganjavi
devoted his Layli o Majnoon to the Shirwanshah Akhsitan the son of
Manuchehr (whose name according to Minorsky could possibly be Ossetic). The
Shirwanshahs not only survived the Seljuq invasion, but they also survived the
subsequent Khwarazmian, Mongol, and Turkmen invasions and their rule ended
around 1607 A.D. during the Safavid era. They are well known for their
patronization of Persian culture and language. The introduction of Layli o
Majnoon was misinterpreted during the USSR era in order to claim Turkic
descent for Nizami Ganjavi. We shall address this issue in a later section. As
will be touched upon later, Nizami Ganjavi entrusted his son to the son of
Akhsitan.

Overall, the Iranian nomadic incursions (Scythians,
Cimmerians...) and the subsequent Medes, Achaemenids, Parthians, Sassanids and
the subsequent Musafarids, Shaddadid and Shirwanshahs brought strong
Iranicization to the region of Arran(and Shirwan) and many Iranian toponyms for
the major cities of the region, as well as fire temples, also attest to this
fact.

Also many local Iranian dynasties like the Mihranid and
various Armenian dynasties were of Iranian(Parthian/Middle Persian speaking)
origin. The name Ganja, which could date back to the Sassanid era (See “Ganja”
in Encyclopedia Iranica by C.E. Bosworth) and other Iranian names (Darband,
Piruzpat, Sharwan...) are testament to these settlements. A testament to the
Sassanid influence is given by the fact that Nizami Ganjavi chose the two most
important work of his (Haft Paykar and Khusraw o Shirin) based on
his own free will. Besides Nizami Ganjavi, Khaqani Shirwani and Qatran Tabrizi,
as well many other poets from the region have praised the Sassanid dynasty,
which shows its lasting influence on the region’s culture, despite its demise
500 year prior to Khaqani and Nezami.We
shall mention this briefly when we discuss Qatran Tabrizi.

The rise of the Seljuq Empire had a significant
social and political effect in the Islamic world and beyond. We will briefly
touch upon the most salient aspects of this empire. For more detailed
information, the reader is referred to Encyclopedia of Islam (Saldjukids) and Cambridge history of Iran.

According to Professor Ehsan Yarshater (“Iran”
in Encyclopedia Iranica):

A Turkic nomadic people called Oghuz (Ghozz in Arabic and
Persian sources) began to penetrate into the regions south of Oxus
during the early Ghaznavid period. Their settlement in Khorasan led to
confrontation with the Ghaznavid Masud, who could not stop their advance. They
were led by the brothers Tögrel, Čaghri, and Yinal, the grandsons of
Saljuq, whose clan had assumed the leadership of the incomers.

Tögrel, an able general, who proclaimed himself Sultan in
1038, began a systematic conquest of the various provinces of Persia and
Transoxiana, wrenching Chorasmia from its Ghaznavid governor and securing the
submission of the Ziyrids in Gorgan. The Saljuqids, who had championed the
cause of Sunnite Islam, thereby ingratiating themselves with the orthodox
Muslims, were able to defeat the Deylamite Kakuyids, capturing Ray, Qazvin, and
Hamadan, and bringing down the Kurdish rulers of the Jebal and advancing as far
west as Holwan and Kanaqayn. A series of back and forth battles with the Buyids
and rulers of Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia ensued; and, although the
Saljuqids occasionally suffered reverses, in the end their ambition, tenacity,
and ruthlessness secured for them all of Persia and Caucasus. By the time
Tögrel triumphantly entered Baghdad on 18
December 1055, he was the master of nearly all of the lands of Sasanian Iran. He had
his title of Sultan confirmed by the caliph, and he now became the caliph’s
protector, freeing the caliphate from the bond of Shiite Buyids.

After nearly 200 years since the rise of the Saffarids in
861, this was the first time that all of Persia and its dependencies came
under a single and powerful rule which did not dissipate and disband after a
single generation. Tögrel (1040-63) was followed by his nephew Alp Arslan (q.v.;
1063-73). He was a warrior king. In his lifetime the realm of the Saljuqids was
extended from the Jaxartes in the east to the shores of the Black
Sea in the west. He captured Kottalan in the upper Oxus valley,
conquered Abkhazia, and made Georgia
a tributary, and he secured Tokharestan and Čaghanian in the east. In 1069
he crowned his triumphs with his defeat of the eastern Roman emperor, Romanos
Diogenes, by sheer bravery and skillful planning; after extracting a huge
tribute of 1,500,000 dinars he signed a peace treaty with the emperor for 50
years. This victory ended the influence of Byzantine emperors in Armenia and the rest of Caucasus and Azerbaijan, and
spread the fame of the Saljuqid king in the Muslim world.

Alp Arslan was succeeded by his son Malekšah (1073-92). Both
were capable rulers who were served by the illustrious vizier Nezam-al-molk (d.
1092). Their rule brought peace and prosperity to a country torn for more than
two centuries by the ravages of military claimants of different stripes.
Military commands remained in the hands of the Turkish generals, while
administration was carried out by Persians, a pattern that continued for many
centuries. Under Malekšah the Saljuqid power was honored, through a number of
successful campaigns, as far north as Kashgar and Khotan in eastern Central
Asia, and as far west as Syria, Anatolia, and even the Yemen, with the caliph
in Baghdad subservient to the wishes of the great Saljuqid sultans.

The ascent of the Saljuqids also put an end to a period
which Minorsky has called “the Persian intermezzo”(see Minorsky, 1932, p. 21),
when Iranian dynasties, consisting mainly of the Saffarids, the Samanids, the
Ziyarids, the Buyids, the Kakuyids, and the Bavandids of Tabarestan and Gilan,
ruled most of Iran.
By all accounts, weary of the miseries and devastations of never-ending
conflicts and wars, Persians seemed to have sighed with relief and to have
welcomed the stability of the Saljuqid rule, all the more so since the
Saljuqids mitigated the effect of their foreignness, quickly adopting the
Persian culture and court customs and procedures and leaving the civil
administration in the hand of Persian personnel, headed by such capable and
learned viziers as ‘Amid-al-Molk Kondori and Nezam-al-Molk.

After Malekšah’s death, however, internal strife began to
set in, and the Turkish tribal chiefs’tendencies to claim a share of the power,
and the practice of the Saljuqid sultans to appoint the tutors (atabaks)
of their children as provincial governors, who often became enamored of their
power and independence, tended to create multiple power centers. Several
Saljuqid lines gradually developed, including the Saljuqids of Kerman
(1048-1188) and the Saljuqids of Rum in Anatolia (1081-1307); the latter
survived the great Saljuqs by more than a century and were instrumental in
spreading the Persian culture and language in Anatolia
prior to the Ottoman conquest of the region.

The establishment of the Turkish Seljuq Empire in Persia and Iraq reversed the political march
of Shi’ism and the removal of the Buyyid dynasty reinvigorated the Sunnite
World. The Seljuqs were Sunnis of Hanafi rite who replaced the existing powers
in Persia including the
Ghaznawids and Shi’i Daylamite dynasties of northern and western Persia.
C.E. Bosworth brings an interesting praise of the Seljuqs by their Persian
historian, Rawandi:

“Saljuqs achieved some prestige in the
eyes of the Orthodox by overthrowing Shi’i Buyid rule in Western
Iran. Sunni writers even came to give an ideological justification
for the Turks’political and military domination of the Middle
East. The Iranian historian of the Saljuqs, Rawandi, dedicated his
Rahat al-Sudur to one of the Saljuq Sultans of Rum, Ghiyath al-Din Kay
Khusraw, and speaks of a hatif, a hidden, supernatural voice, which spoke from
the Ka’ba in Mecca to the Imam Abu Hanifa and promised him that as long as the
sword remained in the hands of the Turks, his faith (that of the Hanafi law
school, which was followed par excellence by Turks) would not perish.
Rawandi himself adds the pious doxology, “Praise be to God, He is exalted, that
the defenders of Islam are mighty and that the followers of the Hanafi rite are
happy and In the lands of the Arabs, Persians, Byzantines and Russians, the
sword is in the hand of the Turks, and fear of their sword is firmly implanted
in all hearts!”

(C.E. Bosworth, “The rise of Saljuqs”, Cambridge
History of Iran).

Indeed religious loyalties were for the most part
much stronger than ethnic affinities during these centuries and the Seljuqs were
welcomed by many Iranian Sunnis.

According to the Encyclopedia of Islam:

“The Seljuqs were soon able to overrun Khorasan and then to
sweep into the remainder of Persia.
We need not assume that the actual numbers of the Turkmens were very large; for
the ways of life possible in the steppes meant that there were natural and
environmental limitations on the numbers of the nomads. Yuri Bregel has
implied, working from the 16,000 Oghuz mentioned by the Ghaznawid historian
Bayhaki as present on the battle field of Dandankan (Tarikh-i Masudi ,
ed. Ghani and Fayyad, Tehran 1324/1945, 619), that we should probably assume,
in this instance, a ratio of one fighting man to four other members of the
family, yielding some 64,000 Turkmens moving into Khorasan at this time (Turko-Mongol
influences in Central Asia, in R.L. Canfield (ed.), Turko-Persia in
historical perspective, Cambridge 1991, 58 and n. 10).

...

The sultans never conceived of themselves as despotic rulers
over a monolithic empire, rulers in the Perso-Islamic tradition of the power
state as it had developed, for instance, under the early Ghaznawids [q.v.].
They had risen to power as the successful military leaders of bands of their
fellow-Oghuz tribesmen, and at the outset depended solely on these tribal
elements. The position of the Saldjuk sultans was thus fundamentally different
from their predecessors in the East, both from the Samanids, with their
aristocratic Iranian background but a military dependence on professional,
largely slave Turkish, troops, and from the Ghaznawids, themselves of slave
origin and dependent on a purely professional, salaried standing army;
likewise, their opponents in the West, the Buyids and Fatimids, had come to
depend upon professional, multi-ethnic armies. The sultans did not prove to be
wholly exempt from the pressures arising out of the ethos of power in the
Middle East at this time; they endeavoured to increase their own authority and
to some extent to marginalise the Turkmen tribal elements, yet these last
remained strong within the empire, and on occasions, powerful enough to aspire,
through their favoured candidates for the supreme office of sultan, to a
controlling influence in the state.

…

The threat of economic dislocation to
the agricultural prosperity of Persia
was alleviated by the deflection of the Turkmens and their herds westwards,
against the Christian princes of the Caucasus and Anatolia and against the
Fatimites and their allies in Syria,
and Alp Arsalan attached such importance to these projects that he fought in Georgia and Armenia personally.

…

…

Whilst many of the Turkmen elements
percolating into northern Persia all through the Seljuq period passed on
towards Anatolia, others became part of the increasing nomadic and transhumant
population of Persia and central Arab lands, and this process became
accelerated in the time of succeeding invaders, the Khwarizmshahs and Mongols,
through the movement of the Turco-Mongol people.

(“Saljuqids”in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2007).

According to the Encyclopedia of Islam:

“Culturally, the constituting of the
Seljuq Empire marked a further step in the dethronement of Arabic from being
the sole lingua franca of educated and polite society in the Middle
East. Coming as they did through a Transoxania which was still substantially
Iranian and into Persia
proper, the Seljuqs with no high-level Turkish cultural or literary heritage of
their own – took over that of Persia,
so that the Persian language became the administration and culture in their land of Persia
and Anatolia. The Persian culture of the Rum
Seljuqs was particularly splendid, and it was only gradually that Turkish
emerged there as a parallel language in the field of government and adab; the
Persian imprint in Ottoman civilization was to remain strong until the 19th
century.”

(“Saljuqids”in the Encyclopedia of Islam).

Rene
Grousset states: "It is to be noted that the
Seljuks, those Turkomans who became sultans of Persia, did not Turkify
Persia-no doubt because they did not wish to do so. On the contrary, it was
they who voluntarily became Persians and who, in the manner of the great old
Sassanid kings, strove to protect the Iranian populations from the plundering
of Ghuzz bands and save Iranian culture from the Turkoman menace"

(Grousset,
Rene, The Empire of the Steppes, (Rutgers University Press, 1991), 161,164)

It is noteworthy that the Persian culture of the
Seljuqid era was not that of the culture of their Turcoman troops but rather
the culture of native population of the lands they conquered as well as the
high culture of the court. The Seljuqs relied upon Iranian Viziers including
the famous Nizam al-Mulk to run the everyday affairs. They also lacked a high
culture of their own and in reality had no alternative except to adopt Persian
culture as part of their own culture. The Seljuq were also major patrons of
Persian culture. Many of their ministers and viziers were Persian. The most
famous of these viziers was Nizam al-Mulk, whose influence was so pervasive
that a later historian like Ibn al-Athir calls his thirty years of office as
the government of Nizamiyya.

Mehmad
Fuad Koprulu also speaks about the pre-Islamic and post-Islamic Iranian
influence on Turks and the Seljuqs of Rum:

“On Pre-Islamic influence, one must mention Soghdians who
influenced Eastern Turks greatly. Because of their geographical location, the
Turks were in continuous contact with China
and Iran
from very ancient times. The early Chinese chronicles, which are reliable and
comprehensive, show the relationship of the Turks with China fairly
clearly. The early relationship of the Turks with Iran, however, only enters the
light of history - leaving aside the legends in the Shahname — at the time of
the last Sasanid rulers. After the Turks had lived under the influence of these
two civilizations for centuries, Iran, which had accepted Islam,
gradually brought them into its sphere of influence. Even during the
development of the Uighur civilization, which was the {Turkish civilization}
most strongly influenced by China, the attraction of the Turks to Iranian
civilization, which had proven its worth in art, language, and thought, was
virtually unavoidable, especially after it was invigorated with a new religion.

Even before it drew the Turks into its sphere of influence,
Iranian civilization had had, in fact, a major effect on Islam. With respect to
the concept of govern­ment and the organization of the state, the Abbasids were
attached not to the traditions of the Khulafa al-Rashidun {the first four
caliphs} but to the mentality of the Sasanid rulers. After Khurasan and
Transoxiana passed into the hands of native Iranian — and subsequently highly
Iranized Turkish — dynasties with only nominal allegiance to the Abbasids, the
former Iranian spirit, which the Islamic onslaught was not able to destroy
despite its ruthlessness, again revealed itself. In the fourth/tenth century,
Persian language and literature began to grow and develop in an Islamic form.
This Perso-Islamic literature was influenced, to a large extent, by the
literature of the conquerors. Not only were a great many words brought into the
language via the new religion, but new verse forms, a new metrical system, and
new stylistic norms were also adopted in great measure from the Arabs.

Indeed, almost nothing remained of the old Iranian syllabic
metrical system, the old verse forms, or the old ideas about literature. Still,
the Iranians, as heirs of an ancient civilization, were able to express their
own personality in their literature despite this enormous Arab influence. They
adopted from the ‘arud meters only those that suited their taste. They created
or, perhaps, revived the ruba’i form {of verse}. They also introduced novelties
in the qasida form {of verse}, which can be considered an old and well known
product of Arabic literature, and in the ghazal {lyric “love song”}. Above all,
by reanimat­ing {their own} ancient mythology, they launched an “epic
cycle”that was completely foreign to Arabic literature.

These developments were on such a scale that the
fifth/eleventh century witnessed the formation of a new Persian literature in
all its glory.

The Turks adopted a great many elements of Islam not
directly from the Arabs, but via the Iranians. Islamic civilization came to the
Turks by way of Transoxiana from Khurasan, the cultural center of Iran.
Indeed, some of the great cities of Transoxiana were spiritually far more
Iranian than Turkish. Also, the Iranians were no strangers to the Turks, for
they had known each other well before the appearance of Islam.

For all these reasons, it was the Iranians who guided the
Turks into the sphere of Islamic civilization. This fact, naturally, was to
have a profound influence on the development of Turkish literature over the
centuries. Thus, we can assert that by the fifth/eleventh century at least,
Turko-Islamic works had begun to be written in Turkistan
and that they were subject to Perso-Islamic influence. If Iranian influence had
made an impact so quickly and vigorously in an eastern region like Kashghar,
which was a center of the old Uighur civilization and had been under continuous
and strong Chinese influence, then naturally this influence must have been felt
on a much wider scale in regions further to the west and closer to the cities
of Khurasan.

But unfortunately, ruinous invasions, wars, and a thousand
other things over the centuries have destroyed the products of those early
periods and virtually nothing remains in our possession. Let me state clearly
here, however, that such Turkish works that imitated Persian forms and were
written under the influence of Persian literature in Muslim centers were not
widespread among the masses. They were only circulated among the learned who
received a Muslim education in the madrasas {these colleges of Islamic law
began to spread in the fifth/eleventh century}.

….

{As they emigrated to the west,} the Oghuz Turks who settled
in Anatolia came into contact with Arab and Muslim Persian civilization and
then, in the new region to which they had come, encountered remnants of ancient
and non-Muslim civilizations. In the large and old cities of Anatolia,
which were gradually Turkified, the Turks not only encountered earlier
Byzantine and Armenian works of art and architecture, but also, as a result of
living side by side with Christians, naturally participated in a cultural
exchange with them. The nomadic Turks {i.e. Turkmen}, who maintained a tribal
existence and clung to the way of life they had led for centuries, remained
impervious to all such influences. Those who settled in the large cities,
however, unavoidably fell under these alien influences.

At the same time, among the city people, those whose lives
and livelihoods were refined and elevated usually had extensive madrasa
educations and harbored a profound and genuine infatuation with Arab and
Persian learning and literature. Thus, they cultivated a somewhat contemptuous
indifference to this Christian civilization, which they regarded as materially
and morally inferior to Islamic civilization. As a result, the influence of
this non-Muslim civilization on the Turks was chiefly visible, and then only
partially, in those arts, such as architecture, in which the external and
material elements are more obvious. The main result of this influence was that
life in general assumed a more worldly quality.

If we wish to sketch, in broad outline, the civilization
created by the Seljuks of Anatolia, we must recognize that the local, i.e.
non-Muslim, element was fairly insignificant compared to the Turkish and
Arab-Persian elements, and that the Persian element was paramount/The Seljuk
rulers, to be sure, who were in contact with not only Muslim Persian
civilization, but also with the Arab civiliza­tions in al-Jazira and Syria -
indeed, with all Muslim peoples as far as India — also had connections with
{various} Byzantine courts. Some of these rulers, like the great ‘Ala’al-Din
Kai-Qubad I himself, who married Byzantine princesses and thus strengthened
relations with their neighbors to the west, lived for many years in Byzantium
and became very familiar with the customs and ceremonial at the Byzantine
court. Still, this close contact with the ancient Greco-Roman and Christian
traditions only resulted in their adoption of a policy of tolerance toward art,
aesthetic life, painting, music, independent thought - in short, toward those
things that were frowned upon by the narrow and piously ascetic views {of their
subjects}. The contact of the common people with the Greeks and Armenians had
basically the same result.

{Before coming to Anatolia,}
the Turks had been in contact with many nations and had long shown their
ability to synthesize the artistic elements that they had adopted from these
nations. When they settled in Anatolia, they
encountered peoples with whom they had not yet been in contact and immediately
established relations with them as well. Ala al-Din Kai-Qubad I established
ties with the Genoese and, especially, the Venetians at the ports of Sinop and
Antalya, which belonged to him, and granted them commercial and legal
concessions.’’Mean­while, the Mongol invasion, which caused a great number of
scholars and artisans to flee from Turkistan,
Iran, and
Khwarazm and settle within the Empire of the Seljuks of Anatolia, resulted in a
reinforcing of Persian influence on the Anatolian Turks. Indeed, despite all
claims to the contrary, there is no question that Persian influence was
paramount among the Seljuks of Anatolia. This is clearly revealed by the fact
that the sultans who ascended the throne after Ghiyath al-Din Kai-Khusraw I
assumed titles taken from ancient Persian mythology, like Kai-Khusraw, Kai-Ka
us, and Kai-Qubad; and that. Ala’al-Din Kai-Qubad I had some passages from the
Shahname inscribed on the walls of Konya and Sivas. When we take into
consideration domestic life in the Konya
courts and the sincerity of the favor and attachment of the rulers to Persian
poets and Persian literature, then this fact {i.e. the importance of Persian
influence} is undeniable. With regard to the private lives of the rulers, their
amusements, and palace ceremonial, the most definite influence was also that of
Iran, mixed with the early
Turkish traditions, and not that of Byzantium.
(Mehmed Fuad Koprulu , Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, Translated by Gary
Leiser and Robert Dankoff , Routledge, 2006, pg 149)

According
to Hodgson:

“The rise of Persian (the language) had more than purely
literary consequence: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation
within Islamdom. Henceforth while Arabic held its own as the primary language
of the religious disciplines and even, largely, of natural science and
philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly part of Islamdom, the language
of polite culture; it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing
effects. It was to form the chief model of the rise of still other languages.
Gradually a third ‘‘classical’’tongue emerged, Turkish, whose literature was
based on Persian tradition.”

E.
J. W. Gibb, author of the standard A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry
in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications
of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, the Gibb Memorial Series. Gibb
classifies Ottoman poetry between the Old School, from the fourteenth century
to about the middle of the nineteenth, during which time Persian influence was
dominant; and the ModernSchool, which came into
being as a result of the Western impact. According to him in the introduction
(Volume I):

The Turks very early appropriated the entire Persian
literary system down to its minute detail, and that in the same unquestioning
and wholehearted fashion in which they had already accepted Islam.

The
Seljuqs had, in the words of the same author:

Attained a very considerable degree of culture, thanks
entirely to Persian tutorage. About the middle of the eleventh century they
[that is, the Saljuqs] had overrun Persia, when, as so often happened,
the Barbarian conquerors adopted the culture of their civilized subjects.
Rapidly the Seljuq Turks pushed their conquest westward, ever carrying with
them Persian culture ...

So, when some hundred and fifty years later Sulayman’s son
[the leader of the Ottomans] . . . penetrated into Asia Minor, they [the Ottomans]
found that although Seljuq Turkish was the everyday speech of the people,
Persian was the language of the court, while Persian literature and Persian
culture reigned supreme. It is to the Seljuqs, with whom they were thus fused,
that the Ottomans, strictly so called, owe their literary education; this
therefore was of necessity Persian as the Seljuqs knew no other.

The Turks were not content with learning from the Persians
how to express thought; they went to them to learn what to think and in what
way to think. In practical matters, in the affairs of everyday life and in the
business of government, they preferred their own ideas; but in the sphere of
science and literature they went to school with the Persian, intent not merely
on acquiring his method, but on entering into his spirit, thinking his thought
and feeling his feelings. And in this school they continued so long as there
was a master to teach them; for the step thus taken at the outset developed
into a practice; it became the rule with the Turkish poets to look ever
Persia-ward for guidance and to follow whatever fashion might prevail there.
Thus it comes about that for centuries Ottoman poetry continued to reflect as
in a glass the several phases through which that of Persia passed....

So the first Ottoman poets, and their successors through
many a generation, strove with all their strength to write what is little else
than Persian poetry in Turkish words. But such was not consciously their aim;
of national feeling in poetry they dreamed not; poetry was to them one and
indivisible, the language in which it was written merely an unimportant
accident.”

C.E.
Bosworth mentions:

While the Arabic language retained its primacy in such
spheres as law, theology and science, the culture of the Seljuk court and
secular literature within the sultanate became largely Persianized; this is
seen in the early adoption of Persian epic names by the Seljuq Rulers (Qubad,
Kay Khusraw and so on) and in the use of Persian as a literary language
(Turkish must have been essentially a vehicle for every days speech at this
time). The process of Persianization accelerated in the thirteenth century with
the presence in Konya of two of the most distinguished refugees fleeing before
the Mongols, Baha al-din Walad and his son Mawlana Jalal al-din Rumi, whose
Mathnawi, composed in Konya, constitutes one of the crowning glories of
classical Persian literature.

(“Turkish
expansion towards the west”, in UNESCO History Of Humanity, Volume IV: From the
Seventh to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO Publishing / Routledge, 2000.).

The overall political and cultural climate of the
Seljuqs is succinctly summarized.

“The entry of the Seljuqs and their
nomadic followers began a long process of profound social, economic and ethnic
changes to the ‘northern tier’of the Middle East, namely the zone of lands
extending from Afghanistan in the east through Persia and Kurdistan to Anatolia
in the west; these changes included certain increase in pastoralisation and a
definitely increased degree of Turkicisation. Within the Seljuq lands there
remained significant number of Turkish nomads, largely unassimilated t settle
life and resentful of central control, and especially, of taxation. The problem
of integrating such elements into the fabric of state was never solved by the
Seljuq sultans; where Sanjar’s reign ended disastrously in an uprising of Oghuz
tribesmen whose interest had, they felt, been neglected by the central
administration, the Oghuz captured the Sultan, and, on his death soon afterwards,
Khorasan slipped definitely from Seljuq control. The last Seljuq sultan in the
west, Toghril III, struggled to free himself from control by the Eldiguzid
Atabegs, but unwisely provoked a war with the powerful and ambitious Khwarazm
Shah Tekish and was killed in 1194. Only in central Anatolia did a Seljuq line,
that of the sultans of rum with the capital at Konya, survive for a further century or so.”

(C.E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties).

Thus the Seljuqs were one of the reasons of the
gradual Turkification that was brought upon in the region.Although the Seljuq elites and Sultan had
Persian culture, the Turkomen nomads who were the backbone of their army was
not Persianized at that time.

The number of these nomads as shown by the
Encyclopedia of Islam was not large and many of the Turkmen followers found new
pasture land through the conquest of the former Christian lands of Armenia,
Georgia and Anatolia.Much larger number
of nomads appeared during the Mongol era.

Thus the actual number of nomadic Turks that came
to the region with the Seljuqs were small and this is clearly seen in the book
of Nozhat al-Majales were the everyday Muslim urban culture was Persian/Iranian
and there is absolutely no hint of any Turkish culture in the region.The Turkish dynasties themselves like
Seljuqs, Eldiguzids, Ahmadilis became Persianized and we do not see trace of
any Turkish culture from their courts as well.However, after the Khwarzmian empire and the Mongol conquest (the
majority of whose elements were Turkic and also their movement pushed opposing
Turkic tribes westwards), larger number of Turkic elements were also pushed
from Central Asia towards Anatolia, Persia and the Caucasus.When it comes to the plans, there could have
been a significant Turkic element by the end of the Seljuqid era, however these
had to compete with the already established Iranian tribal elements.

Still the major urban centers were not affected since
the cultural of the Turkmen nomads was not compatible with the urban culture whose
major elements were Iranian in Persia
and cities like Ganja, Darband and Tabriz.
Thus we see for example during the
Ilkhanid era, Tabriz which was a major city had its own Iranian language as
recorded in the Safinaye Tabrizi and it is called “Zaban-e-Tabrizi”.The cultural language was also Persian which
was related to the Tabrizi dialect.In
Maragha, we saw that Hamdullah Mustawafi clearly shows that the language was
Fahlavi.In the Caucasus, the Nozhat
al-Majales which is from 1250 or so again shows that Iranic culture was
prevalent.

The migratory Turkmen tribes should not be
confused with more advanced urban Turkic cultures like those of Kashghar or
Uighyurs who were influenced by Soghdians. We already brought the example of Tabriz, where historical
sources use the term “Zaban-e-Tabrizi” for the Persian dialect that was
predominant there, even during the Ilkhanid era. Also according to Diakonov
(1994) as mentioned:

“There were slight problems with Nizami - first of all he
was not Azeri but Persian (Iranian) poet, and though he lived in presently
Azerbaijani city of Ganja,
which, like many cities in the region, had Iranian population in Middle Ages”.

Thus Nizami’s urban background in this author’s
opinion clearly again establishes a non-Turkic father line. For example Nizami
Ganjavi explicitly mentions the nomadic lifestyle of Turks:

چو ترکان
گشته سوی کوچ
محتاج

به ترکی
داده رختم را
به تاراج

(خسرو
و شیرین)

ترک سمن
خیمه به صحرا
زده

ماهچه
خیمه به صحرا
زده

(مخزن
الاسرار)

Additionally we note there is no tribal
designation (Seljuq, Bayat, Oghuz, Bayandur...) in the names of his
forefathers. While Persian culture was not the culture of the nomadic Turkmen
supporters of the Seljuqs, but it was the main culture of the courts, viziers,
sedentary towns ofthe empire.Linguistically this makes sense, since the
major ethnic component of Greater Persia including Central Asia and the
Caucasia (Nezami addressing his different patrons as Kings of Persia) were
Iranian and Iranian ministers had a large say in the Seljuq government. Later
in this article, we shall delve into these points in more detail.

During the era when Nizami was born, Seljuq power
was actually declining and new local dynasties called Atabegs were former who
effectively held major power and were under nominal Seljuq control. Atabegs
were originally commanders who were trusted as tutors for young Seljuk princes.
But later on, they grew powerful enough to become virtually independent of the
Seljuq Sultan and were sometimes the driving force in Seljuq politics. Two of
these dynasties who actually commissioned Nizami Ganjavi to write two of his
most important epics were the rival dynasties of Eldiguzids and Ahmadilis.
Later on historians would also refer to them as Atabakan-e-Azerbaijan and Atabakan-e-Maragheh.Interestingly enough, they allowed Nezami
Ganjavi to choose the topic (unlike the quest by Shirwanshahs which wanted the
story of Leyli o Majnoon) and Nezami voluntarily chose the Sassanid stories of
Khusraw o Shirin and Haft Paykar.

The Eldiguzid were an Atabeg (feudal-lord) dynasty
of Qipchaq Turkic origin who controlled most Azerbaijan,
Arran and the northern Jibal during the second
half of the 12th century. At this time, the Seljuq sultanate of Persia and Iraq was in full decay and unable
to prevent the expansion of the virtually independent dynasties. Eldiguz was in
control of Ganja, which the contemporary Kurdish Muslim historian Ibn Athir
(1160-1233) has called “The mother city of Arran”.During the reign of the Seljuqid ruler Arsalan, the Eldiguizds were the
power behind the throne and controlled the great Seljuqid Empire. Their
territories stretched from the south as far as Isfahan, in the west to Akhlat and in the
north to Sharwan (controlled by the Sharwan) and Georgian dynasties. In their
last phase of the Eldiguzids, their power decayed and they were once more local
rulers in Azerbaijan and
east Transcaucasia, and by 1225, they were
incorporated into the Khwarazm Shah Empire.

“The
historical significance of these Atabegs thus lies in their firm control over
most of north-west Persia
during the later Seljuq period and also in their role in Transcaucasia
as champions of Islam against the resurgent Bagratid Georgian kings”.

(C.E.
Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties).

The Encyclopedia Iranica has an overview of the
Eldiguzids under the entry “Atabakan-i
Azerbaijan”(a name used by historians to distinguish different Atabek kingdoms
based on regions) states:

ATĀBAKĀN-E ĀZARBĀYJĀN, an influential family of military slave origin, also called
Ildegozids, ruled parts of Arrān and Azerbaijan from about 530/1135-36 to
622/1225; as “Great Atābaks”(atābakān-e azam) of the Saljuq
sultans of Persian Iraq (western Iran), they effectively controlled the sultans
from 555/1160 to 587/1181; in their third phase they were again local rulers in
Arrān and Azerbaijan until the territories which had not already been lost
to the Georgians, were seized by Jalāl-al-dīn Khārazmšāh in
622/1225.

Literature, learning, and architecture. All of the
Ildegozids were patrons of literature and learning, even though the later ones
were apparently more drunken than devout. They were patrons of many of the
well-known poets of the period and were closely associated with some of them.
Mojīr-al-dīn Baylaqānī seems to have been closer to
Īldegoz and Mohammad whereas Athīr-al-dīn Akhsīkatī
was nearer to Qezel Arslān (Dīvān-e Athīr, introd.
Homāyūn Farrokh, pp. 75-77; Rypka, Hist. Iran. Lit., p. 208). Zahīr-al-dīn
Fāryābī is especially associated with Abū Bakr
(Dīvān, introd. Bīneš, pp. 86-92). Šaraf-al-dīn Šafarva
Esfahānī may have belonged to Mohammad’s entourage (Awfī,
Lobāb, p. 615). Other poets connected with the family are: Emādī
Šahrīārī (Awfī, p. 724; Shafā, Adabīyāt II,
p. 745); Jamāl-al-dīn Mohammad Abd-al-Razzāq Esfahānī
(Shafā, II, p. 732); Rokn-al-dīn Davīdār (Shafā,
III/1, p. 347); Athīr-al-dīn Awmānī (Shafā, III/1, p.
395); Qewāmī Moarrezī, Yūsof Fożūlī
(Dawlatšāh, ed. Browne, p. 117); Jamāl Ašharī (Awfī, p.
406); Jamāl oǰandī (Ebn Esfandīār, II, p. 152).
Khāqānī wrote poems in praise of Qezel Arslān
(Dīvān, introd. Abbāsī, p. 26) and also wrote a long letter
to that atābak (Monšaāt, pp. 148-63). Nezāmī Ganjavī
certainly dedicated his Khosrow o Šīrīn to members of the family,
first to Mohammad, then to Qezel Arslān, along with Sultan Toghrel,
according to Shafā (II, p. 803). As far as Nezāmī’s
Eqbāl-nāma is concerned, there is a difference of opinion
(Nafīsī, Nezāmī, pp. 115-16; Minorsky, “Caucasica II,”pp.
872-74; Shafā, II, pp. 704-06) as to whether or not it was dedicated to an
Ildegozid. It does seem to be true that the only meeting Nezāmī had
with any ruler was with Qezel Arslān (Nafīsī, Nezāmī, pp.
86-93). Uzbek’s vizier, Abu’l-Qāsem Hārūn (q.v.) was a
well-known patron of learning in Tabrīz.

We should note that the court culture of the Eldiguzids
was also Persian and culturally, they were not different than the Persianized
Seljuqid elite.The urban centers and
culture was Iranian at the time as shown clearly by books such as Nozhat
al-Majales.

We should also note that Nezami Ganjavi was not a
court poet and was not attached to any particular dynasty.Thus Nezami was more like Ferdowsi, who was
not a court poet and unlike Khaqani or Onsori who were court poets.For example, he devotes works to rival
dynasties of Ildiguzids including the Shirwanshahs and Ahmadilis.He also sent his son to the court of the
Sherwanshahs and entrusts his son to them.

Another dynasty which commissioned one of Nizami
Ganjavi’s works (the Haft Paykar) was the Ahmadilis. The Ahmadilis which
historians have also called “Atabakan-Maragheh” were rulers of Maragheh and Ru’in
Diz (Ruin Duzh=Persian for Brass Fort compare with Esfandyar’s title “Ruyin
Tan”(invulnerable body)) in Iranian Azerbaijan. The dynasty ruled early in
Maragheh in the 12th century and maintained themselves against the
much more powerful neighbors like Eldiguzid Atabegs. Aq Sunqur Ahmadili, the
founder of this dynasty, was presumably a freeman of Ahmadil, a Kurdish noble
possibly related to the Rawwadids. Ala’al-din Korp Arsalan, who the Haft
Paykar was commissioned by (the story itself being chosen by Nizami
Ganjavi) is said to have ruled between 1175-1188.

The fact that Nizami Ganjavi was commissioned by
at least three rival dynasties (Shirwanshah, Eldiguzid and Ahmadilis) is a testament
to his fame.We should note the court culture
of all these dynasties(whatever their ethnic origin) was Persian and one cannot
claim these dynasties had a non-Iranianidentity.Since the court itself
brought Iranianization of these dynasties as the administrators, officials and
poets who gathered there were natives of the region whose urban cultural
language was Persian.Also the Viziers
of majority of the Persianized Turkic dynasties who ruled Iran, Caucasus and even
sometimes India were of Iranian origin.At
the same time, Nizami Ganjavi was aloof from politics and was not a court poet.
This allowed him to remain on friendly terms with rival dynasties that actually
attacked each other’s territories. The Encyclopedia of Islam entry on him
states:

“Usually, there is more precise biographical information
about the Persian court poets, but Nizami was not a court poet; he feared loss
of integrity in this role and craved primarily for the freedom of artistic
creation. His five masterpieces are known collectively as the Khamsa, Quintet,
or the Pandj Gandj, the Five Treasures. The five epic poems represent a total
of close to 30,000 couplets and they constitute a breakthrough in Persian
literature. Nizami was a master in the genre of the romantic epic.”

Overall, a brief survey of all these dynasties
(Rawwadids, Shaddadids, Shirwanshah, Seljuqids, Eldiguzids and Ahmadilis) is
important. The Rawwadids, Shirwanshah and Shaddadids were some of the early
patrons of Persian-Dari poetry in the area and the Shirwanshah ruled the area
of Shirwan during the time of Nizami Ganjavi. Taking Tabriz as an example, and also the statement
of Diakonov about Ganja, Ganja transitioned from Iranic rule to that of
Persianate Turkic dynasties but it did not lose its Iranic character at once
and overnight. The general Muslim
culture of Arran and Sherwan during the era of Nezami Ganjavi is reflected
perfectly in its totality in the book Nozhat al-Majales.This book provides the best evidence of the
culture of the region today and unless a time-machine is created, it is the best
resource available to scholar to assess the urban culture of the population.

The Persianate Turkic dynasties although of
nomadic origin were nevertheless soon establishing their thrones and ruled in
what C.E. Bosworth has called Perso-Islamic manner. Their courtly life was in
Persian and they upheld Persian culture and standards in governing their major
cities.This was because the bulk of the
Muslim population was Iranian and culturally Persian was the chief
language.This might have alienated them
from their Turkomen followers as it was the case for the Seljuqid Sultan
Sanjar. Yet many Iranian Sunnis supported the Seljuqids in order to weaken the
rise of Shi’ism under the Buyid dynasty. They also supported the Seljuqid rule,
since it brought a sense of stability and unity which did not exist prior.

Ganja,
which was called the mother city of Arran, was the capital of the Shaddadids
(assuming Nizami’s great ancestor was from them). We already touched upon
Nizami’s Kurdish mother and his Kurdish uncle who raised him. Later on Ganja
passed to the Seljuqs and Eldiguzids before the Khwarazmid and Mongol invasion.
There is no evidence of the process of Turkification of Ganja at the time of
Nizami (as the Oghuz nomads were not urban and the book Nozhat al-Majales shows
the culture of everyday urban people was Persian).Also looking at Tabriz (a city under the
Ildiguzids) as an example (which had an Iranic language after Mongol invasion
as exemplified in the Safinayeh Tabriz), it is clear (as mentioned by Diakonov)
that Ganja was an Iranic speaking city, at least before the Mongols and Ilkhanid
era. Note cities, even when they accept migrants, usually have some capacity to
absorb the migrants and mould them into the
culture of the city. According to Professor Xavier De Planhol:

“Thus Turkish nomads, in spite of their deep penetration
throughout Iranian lands, only slightly influenced the local culture. Elements
borrowed by the Iranians from their invaders were negligible.”

(X.D.
Planhol, LANDS OF IRAN
in Encyclopedia Iranica)

Even during the Mongol era, Hamdullah Mostowfi in
his Nozhat al-Qolub mentions that the city of Abhar (near modern Zanjan) has migrants from
everywhere, “but their language is of not yet
unified, but it will be most likely be a modified Persian”.

We note that travelers before the time of Nizami
Ganjavi maintain Persian (not necessarily Khorasanian Persian) was the major
binding language and was a common language of the area. The influx of Turkish
nomads from the Seljuqs and the much larger influx during the Mongol/Khwarazmid
movement were some of the phases of history in which Turkification of Arran was
gradually started. Indeed on the eve of the Mongol invasion, large numbers of
Turkomen tribes are mentioned in the Caucasia
by Nasavi, the Khwarazmian historian. It is not known if these were pushed by
the waves of Mongols attacking Central Asia or
had come gradually during the Seljuq era.But they were recent nomads and their ancestry does not go back to the
Shaddadid era. Their culture was also
not urban and we do not have any cities with Turkic names at that time while
Ganja, Darband, Barda’, Baku and etc. are all Iranic names.

Thus the subsequent Khwarazmian/Mongol push was
instrumental for the gradual Turkicization of the region of Arran(which in many
maps also includes Shirwan).However,
just taking into account the Seljuq/Eldiguzid era before Khwarzmian empire, the
Oghuz nomads only settled in grazing lands and not cities and even most nomads
of Arran and Sherwan were probably Kurdish and other Iranian/Caucasian
types.The culture of urban Muslim
people and city dwellers was firmly Iranian as shown by the Nozhat al-Majales
and its everyday idiom.

As noted, the Safinaye Tabriz shows a
Persianate-Iranian culture in the city of Tabriz (a city which was also under
the Ildiguzids like Ganja) during the Mongol era. This, despite the fact that
the Mongol army itself was overwhelmingly composed of Turkic tribes. The urban
life of the major cities of the area was not compatible with the nomadic
culture of the Turkomen tribes and the Muslim cities had Perso-Islamic culture.
In Iranian Azerbaijan for example, according to the Encyclopedia Iranica, the
deciding factor for Turkification was the Safavid period:

But the decisive period no doubt occurred in the Safavid
period with the adoption of Shi’ism as the state religion of Iran, while the Ottoman state
remained faithful to Sunnism. Soon Shi’ite propaganda among the tribes located
outside of the urban centers of orthodoxy, prompted the Anatolian nomad tribes
to return to Iran.
This migration began in 1500 when Shah Esmail assembled the Qezelbash tribes in
the region of Erzincan. The attraction made itself felt